CHAPTER X

CURRENT IDEAS IN ST. PETERSBURG

ST. PETERSBURG, _January 27th_.

People are now saying that the revolutionary movement in Russia has suffered a complete defeat. I do not share this point of view; my reason is not based upon prophetic discernment into the future, but on what has happened in the past.

If we are in the presence of a stream and note the beginnings of its turbulent course, and then observe that it has met with the obstacle of a dam and burst through that obstacle, and that this occurrence has been repeated six times, with the result that every time the dam has been burst the stream has gathered in strength, when this dam is made a seventh time we are justified in concluding that as the dam is the same in kind as it was before, and the stream also, the stream will break through it a seventh time, although every time the dam was made the onlookers made the observation that the progress of the stream was definitively impeded. Now this is precisely what has happened with regard to the Russian revolutionary movement up to the present time. And we are now witnessing an act of a drama which began in 1895.

The course of events was like this: When the Emperor Nicholas II. came to the Throne a deputation of the Zemstva were told that their moderate demands for the beginning of reform were senseless dreams. Upon these words the first dam was built, and it took the form of universal repression.

In December, 1904, the ukase, embodying the nullified projects of Prince Mirsky, was immediately followed by a threatening Manifesto, and a second dam was made. This dam, however, was ineffectual, and it was followed by the rising of the workmen of the 9th of January, and when this meeting was dispersed by the troops, and a third dam constructed, people said—and among them people who lived here and ought to have known better—that the Russian revolution was over. February 18th saw the publication of the two contradictory Manifestoes and the Boulygin project, and during this time the dam took the shape of the Trepoff dictatorship, which, as General Trepoff is a competent man, proved to be for the time being more effectual than the obstacles which had hitherto been employed.

However, in spite of this there came the incidents of the mutiny on board the _Kniaz Potemkin_ and at Kronstadt and Libau. This was followed by the concession of the law giving the Duma on August 6th, which was accompanied by a law forbidding public meetings. A fourth dam had been made. But the current only increased in strength. The Agrarian movement began. The Labour movement increased. Meetings took place everywhere till the dam burst, owing to the fact that the whole of Russia went on strike in October, 1905.

Then the Manifesto of the 17th of October was given—a Manifesto granting freedom of meeting and of speech, but no laws. It was followed by the declaration of martial law in Poland. This measure was in its turn succeeded by the St. Petersburg strike, the Sevastopol mutiny, and a violent agrarian agitation in the province of Saratov, which spread all over the “black soil” country in Russia. Repressive measures followed. The Zemstvo leaders then addressed themselves to Count Witte, and asked for a cessation of repressive measures, the control of irresponsible bureaucrats in the provinces, and the right of universal suffrage. This was refused. The postal officials, who had formed a union, were arrested; there ensued postal strikes in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thereupon a law was promulgated—this was the fifth dam—by which each provincial governor could declare his government to be outside the law. This was followed by the armed rising in Moscow, and after this a sixth dam was made by the adoption of repressive measures of arrest all over Russia.

Now, such questions as whether the revolutionary party was right or wrong; whether they were too much in a hurry, and too impulsive and violent in their methods; whether postal officials and Government servants are justified in striking, &c., are altogether beside the mark. The fact is that they have six times been successful in bursting the barrier which has been placed to oppose them. And now once again people are saying that because the movement has been temporarily checked—because a dam has been made—the movement is over; that the stream will not be able to continue its course. This is where I take leave to differ from those who have from the first predicted the ultimate collapse of the revolutionary movement. I differed then—in January, 1905—and I continue to differ now. I am aware that I am laying myself open to the charge of prophesying. “When you keep a diary,” said a shrewd observer of a past generation, “don’t write down public events which you can find in any record, but put down what you think will happen, and then you will be astonished to see how wrong you have been.”

ST. PETERSBURG, _February 1st_.

I have been amusing myself by putting down some current ideas—those of some people I have met here and some of my own, in the form of a dialogue. The people represented are not real people. They are scarcely even types, but mere mouthpieces of current ideas. I have not tried to describe a conversation such as one now hears in Russia, but I have attempted to put in the form of dialogue certain ideas I have heard expressed by my friends and certain opinions which have occurred to myself during such intercourse.

“There are three parties I could belong to,” said the small landlord; “the alliance of October 17th, the alliance of Right and Order, and the Constitutional Democratic Party. I would be willing to support any one of these three, in the hope that they would lead directly or indirectly to the disappearance of the present dynasty and to the establishment of a real autocracy.”

The student laughed. “The Constitutional Democrats will not lead you to an autocracy of any kind,” he said.

“I am not so sure,” said the landlord. “Napoleon was the child of the Revolution, and so was Cromwell. I support the Radicals in the same way in which I would have supported the Puritans to get rid of Charles I., and make way for Cromwell.”

“And Charles II.?” asked the professor, who had just returned from a prolonged stay in England.

“Precisely, and Charles II.,” said the landlord. “The Charles the Firsts of history are invincibly ignorant, whereas the Charles the Seconds have learned the lesson and make ideal monarchs. One cannot always be governed by men of genius, and in the intervening period, when the genius is absent, I prefer to be governed by a man of the world, such as Charles II. or Louis XVIII., rather than by demagogues and idealists.”

“It is better to be governed by honest demagogues and idealists than by dishonest Bureaucrats,” said the student. “The Bureaucrats made the war.”

“When the war was declared you students marched cheering into the streets, and I myself happening to be in uniform that day—I am in the Reserve—was carried in reluctant triumph on the shoulders of an enthusiastic crowd. The war can be blamed, not because it was immoral, for it was not more immoral than any other war, but because it was made too late, and because it was unsuccessful.”

“The war,” said the professor, “was a war made by irresponsible capitalists, in the same way as the South African War was the work of a gang of financiers, and had a true Englishman of genius, such as Gladstone or Bright, been alive, the war would not have been possible.”

“Yes,” said the student, “the feeling here was never so great against England during this war as during the war in South Africa.”

“The English,” answered the landlord, “made the same mistake as we did; they knew nothing about South Africa, and made the war later than they should have done; had they waited longer the Afrikander element would have probably turned them out of South Africa altogether, and they would have lost their prestige and their Colonies. Bismarck foresaw this, and hoped that it might happen.”

“The English have gained nothing by having betrayed their ancient tradition, and sacrificed to false gods,” said the professor, “but now they are returning to the true path, and it is to Liberal England that we must look for example and support.”

“You mean,” said the landlord, “that one set of men, including some bright intellects and a number of average, that is to say, mediocre men, have been replaced by another set of men containing exactly the same proportion of capacity, mediocrity, and incompetence. By what miracle are they to govern the country better or worse than their opponents? Have they shown that they could do so in the past? And I would apply this argument to the situation here. Do you imagine that a Ministry composed of intellectuals would be radically different from a Ministry composed of Bureaucrats? The intellectuals will be merely Bureaucrats who have not learnt their business, and when they have learnt their business they will be Bureaucrats; that is, perhaps, why the Zemstvo leaders were reluctant to enter the Cabinet.”

“The Zemstvo leaders were reluctant to join Count Witte because they disapproved of his programme,” said the student, “and, whether they become Bureaucrats or no, they will be under the control of society.”

“The Bureaucrats are blamed for lawlessness,” said the landlord, “but the revolutionaries seem to me so entirely incapable of controlling themselves that they do not lead one to believe in their capacity for controlling other people. The fact is that we Russians are all a mixture of lawlessness and apathy. We are blamed for our apathy, for our want of co-operation, but I thank Heaven for it, for did it not exist, the lawlessness would lead to excesses of a dangerous character; as it is, there is no country where an individual can enjoy such a degree of personal freedom as in Russia. Russia is the only country where the words liberty, fraternity, and equality have any reality. These things are facts in Russia. But they are not facts in England. First, as regards liberty. There is no liberty either of thought or _mœurs_ in England. Liberty of thought flourishes under an autocracy; in the reign of Nero, Renan tells us, ‘la liberté de penser ne fit que gagner. Cette liberté-là se trouve toujours mieux d’avoir affaire à un roi ou à un prince qu’à des bourgeois jaloux et bornés.’ I do not consider my liberty of thought to be violated if I can only read an eclipsed version of the leading articles of the English and French halfpenny Press; but I do consider it violated if I am forbidden to witness a masterpiece full of thought and moral import, such as Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ or a beautiful play like Mæterlinck’s ‘Monna Vanna.’ This is the case in England. The English fetter themselves with convention, and ostracise those who revolt against the convention. You cannot smoke in a railway refreshment room in England. You must dress for dinner. You cannot have supper after 12.30 a.m. at a restaurant. You cannot go to a theatre on Sunday. You cannot admire anything unless it is the fashion, and once it is the fashion you must admire it. As to equality, the whole of English life is a struggle to belong to the layer of society immediately above your own, and not to be suspected of belonging to that immediately beneath your own. Hence England is the paradise of snobbery, social and intellectual. There is a mad race to be ‘in the swim’ socially and ‘in the know’ intellectually, and to read the right books and admire the right pictures. As to equality I will give you a concrete instance. Let two men get drunk in London, one a rich man and the other a poor man. If they make a disturbance and get taken up, the rich man, by taking a little trouble, will get the matter hushed up. The poor man will not get off. You will say that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor in every country. But I say that here in Russia nobody cares if you go drunk in the street, and that, whether you are rich or poor, if you do so the same thing will happen to you; you will be taken to the _uchastok_ and kept there till you get sober. Whereas in England they care very much; you have to appear before a magistrate—but the rich man will get out of this. As to fraternity, the English hedge themselves round with every kind of social prejudice and barrier they can devise. Their clubs are like their prisons, places where it is forbidden to speak to your neighbour, except under special circumstances, and where you have to wear a special costume. A Russian convict enjoys a greater freedom of social intercourse than an English shopman. I judge from their books. Read ‘Kipps,’ by H. G. Wells. It is a record of leaden social tyranny.”

“What you call convention,” said the professor, “is merely the maintenance of order. It may be exaggerated, but an exaggeration in this sense is preferable to one in the other. You can sup here at a restaurant all night, but a man may shoot you for not being brisk enough in your manifestation of loyalty.”

“Many Englishmen would gladly shoot Mr. Bernard Shaw for the same offence,” said the landlord, “but they have not the courage of their convictions.”

“What you call freedom,” said the professor, “is precisely the opposite of freedom. It is lawlessness. Your neighbour can kill you with impunity. Where does your freedom come in the matter? What freedom is there in not being allowed to read a foreign newspaper unless it is expurgated, or in being sent to Siberia for disapproving of the methods of Government officials?”

“The people who were sent to Siberia,” said the landlord, “were those who wished to overturn the existing form of government, under which the ordinary individual enjoyed peculiar liberty. And even here how mildly the Government acted! Really remarkable agitators like Tolstoi were left alone. The English acted more drastically, and hounded Byron and Shelley from the country. But when it is a question of expressing their convictions they would never throw a bomb; they cannot go further than throwing a herring at Mr. Balfour. The fact is that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and they have the shopkeeper’s aversion from a mess in the shop.”

“If that means having shopmen,” said the professor, “such as Chatham, Fox, Burke, Gladstone, Bright, and Morley, I wish we were also a nation of shopkeepers. If a nation’s destinies are controlled by men like Alexeiev and Bezobrassov it does not seem to me to make it less like a shop, only the shop is managed on dishonest principles.”

“The greatest of all English thinkers,” answered the landlord, “was a dishonest official, Lord Bacon; her greatest soldier a general who peculated, the Duke of Marlborough. The man who made England’s prestige dwindle to its lowest depth was Gladstone.”

“We cannot reach a lower depth than that to which the Bureaucracy has brought us,” said the student.

“As a remedy you want liberal demagogues,” said the landlord. “What we want is not a change of kind, but of quality; not a Liberal Cabinet and a Liberal autocrat, but a capable Cabinet and a capable autocrat; and, therefore, I support the revolutionaries, in the hope that out of the ruins and ashes of what they will destroy the phœnix may arise.”

“And we,” said the student, “can do without phœnixes, which we regard as a doubtful blessing; on the other hand, what we want, and what we are determined to get, are laws, not manifestoes—laws guaranteeing the elementary rights of liberty and equality; and these we are determined to attain, even at the sacrifice of the peculiar liberty, equality, and fraternity which you say we enjoy; even if the ultimate result be that the Emperor ceases to call us _Bratzi_ (little brothers) and the theatres are closed on Sunday.”

ST. PETERSBURG, _February 4th_.

To-day I had a long conversation with X, one of the most enlightened Liberals in the service of the Russian Government. He said that the

## action of the Government in proclaiming the Manifesto of October 17th

could only be compared to the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Revolution before any constitution was defined. The Manifesto had proclaimed in Russia principles unknown in that country, and the fact remained, although it was sometimes overlooked, that it was the Government and not a National Assembly which had taken the momentous step. Whatever circumstances may have provoked this step, it is none the less true that Count Witte by taking it retained the control over the general situation, and still retains it in spite of all appearances to the contrary. This was a merit not recognised by his detractors, who are now universal. Then he went on to say that the source of the trouble and confusion now was that the Manifesto formed the programme and the basis of a Constitution; it was not a Constitution in itself (since it had been conferred by an Autocrat and could be taken back again); this fact had been slow in dawning on the people, unused to abstract political discussion, and most people, probably the majority, considered the Manifesto to be equivalent to an established Constitution. The trouble is, he added, that some of the most intelligent of the moderate Liberals of the upper classes do not know what a Constitution is. If the Manifesto had been immediately followed by a Constitution, the questions which at the present time were giving rise to heated debate would never have been raised. They would have been settled before they were discussed by the public. As it was the Manifesto contained a collection of principles which all parties sought to interpret and to exploit to their own advantage. The reactionary party sees in the preservation of the word “Autocrat” the key of the situation. He added that though his party was not large, and had lost a great deal of its influence, none the less it possessed a deep root in the Conservative element in Russia. Count Witte, he said, is supposed, and rightly, to interpret the word “Autocrat” historically, and to substitute for the word “Limited” that of “Independent” (International). He then spoke of the Octobrists, the party of the 17th of October. He said that they showed conciliatory tendencies, which although obviously well meaning in times of Revolution, made for weakness. They avoid the question of title and that of the oath of the sovereign, and declare themselves satisfied with the clear and precise act guaranteeing the oath on the part of the successor to the throne; and they remain content with the Manifesto as far as the actual sovereign is concerned. The Radical parties take no interest in this question, the Social Democrats take even less, since they look to Revolution and to Revolution only for the ultimate decision of the destiny of their country. There are two other questions, he continued, which up to the present have been scarcely mentioned, nor is there much hope that the Government will have the courage to face them unaided. One is that of the relations among the different nations of which the Russian Empire is composed, the other is the Agrarian question. This last question is not a constitutional or a legislative question. The power of the autocrat, while it existed, could alone have solved it. The autocratic power exists no longer now in fact, although its place has not yet been taken by a definite new _régime_. He said that among the mass of conflicting conjectures and rumours with regard to the future, two important things were clear: (1) that the Government was determined to retain in its hands the power to give a Constitution; (2) that it was determined to grant a Constitution and to proceed to the elections. He said it was impossible to say more at the present; everything depended on the nature of the future Assembly, and whether it would be possible for the Moderate elements to exercise any preponderating influence. Up to now they had been widely divergent and discordant among themselves. If their efforts to gain a solid majority were successful, the greatest danger would be over; if not, the Revolution was in its infancy, for if the Moderates were to fail, the two extreme parties would be left face to face, as different from one another as possible, yet both at one for different reasons in their uncompromising opposition to all temperate and constitutional reform. He said he made no allusion to the various risings and repressions, because these events exercised, in reality, only an indirect influence on the progress of the ideas he had mentioned, sometimes by facilitating their spread, and sometimes by impeding it. It had neither produced nor stopped them. There were two parallel and different currents of events now in progress in Russia. One forced itself on the attention, the other was exceedingly difficult to trace. For that reason it was futile to discuss exclusively the progress of revolutionary feeling and the ultimate success of repressive measures.

It is interesting to look back on this conversation now in December, 1906, since it shows the illusions which Russian Liberals cherished a year ago.

ST. PETERSBURG, _February 11th_.

I have put into the form of a dialogue some of the many conflicting views I have lately heard expressed with regard to Count Witte.

“We have no right,” said the Moderate Liberal, “to doubt the good faith of the Government at the present moment as regards the promise of the Constitution and the elections for the Duma. Until the Government proves to us that it does not intend to keep its word we are bound to believe it.”

“It has never kept its word in the past,” said the student, “and everything which it is doing at present tends to show that it has no intention of doing so now.”

“Count Witte knows what he is doing,” said the man of business. “When our grandchildren read of this in books they will wonder why we were so blind and so obstinate, just as we now wonder at the blindness which prevailed when the opposition to Bismarck was absolutely universal.”

“I share the scepticism of our young friend,” said the Zemstvo representative, “but for different reasons. I do not share your confidence in Count Witte. The basis of that confidence is in your case the fact that Count Witte is a man of business. I maintain that a man of business can only exert a real and lasting influence in the affairs of a nation in times of revolution, convulsion, and evolution, or what you please to call it, on one condition, namely, that of recognising and taking into account the force of ideas and of moral laws. You smile, and say that this is nonsense. But I say this, not because I am an idealist, for I am not one, but because I have got an open mind, which seeks the causes of certain phenomena and finds them in the existence of certain facts. One of these facts is this: that you cannot set at naught certain moral laws; you cannot trample on certain ideas without their rebounding on to you with invincible force. You men of business deny the existence of these moral laws, and scoff at the force of ideas; but it is on practice and facts that I base my argument, and not on theory. That is why men like Cromwell succeed, and why men like Metternich fail.”

“And Napoleon?” asked the man of business.

“Napoleon slighted one of these laws by invading Spain, and this was the cause of his overthrow, although Napoleon was a soldier, which is an incalculable advantage.”

“And Bismarck?” asked the man of business.

“Bismarck,” said the Zemstvo representative, “is a case in point. He followed and used ideas. He worked for the great national ideal, the ideal of united Germany. He incarnated the national idea. What is Count Witte’s ideal? A national loan or the expansion of the Russo-Chinese Bank? It is not enough to say that the revolution is merely the work of enemies financed by foreigners, and then _Schwamm darüber_, as the Germans say. Whoever supports it, it is there; and if it were merely an artificial forced product, surely you, as a man of business, must admit that it would have died a natural death by this time. You say that the people can only be actuated by their own interests. I say that the people are often actuated by something which has nothing to do with their interests. History affords me countless examples which prove I am right. When people have been killed, tortured, and burnt for an idea, it is absurd to say they were interested. Interested in what? In the possible rewards of a future life? But people have been tortured and burnt not only for their faith but for their opinions: Giordano Bruno, De Witt, and many others. There are some, too, whose outward enthusiasm has been lined with scepticism, and who have died for a cause in which they did not even believe. And when a person now throws a bomb at a governor it may explain the fact to say he is mad, but it does not explain the fact to say that he is bought, because he knows quite well he is going to certain death. To deny this is a sign, in my opinion, of a limited intelligence. ‘Il n’a pas l’intelligence assez large,’ a French writer once said, ‘pour concevoir que l’intérêt n’est pas seul à mener le monde, qu’il se mêle souvent et qu’il cède parfois à des passions plus fortes, voire à des passions nobles.’ This is why I disbelieve in Count Witte. I believe he suffers from this limitation, the limitation from which Bismarck did not suffer. In times of peace it would not signify; in times such as these it makes all the difference. Have you read a book by H. G. Wells called the ‘Food of the Gods’? I do not know what the English think of Wells; but we, some of us at least, and the French, take him seriously as a thinker. Well, in this book there is an argument between a Prime Minister and the representative of the giant race. All the Prime Minister’s arguments are excellent, but they are fundamentally wrong, because his action is morally wrong. This story applies to the situation here. A race of giants has grown up. Count Witte, with conviction and eloquence, repeats again and again that their action is impossible, that he must be helped, that the existence of mankind is at stake. But all the time he is denying to this race the right of existence. And they know they have the right to live. He is denying the moral law and saying that his opponents are only hirelings, or madmen. His arguments are specious, but the giants are there, and they will not listen; he sends troops and police against them; they answer by bombarding the country with their giant food, which causes gigantic growth to spring up wherever it falls. In our case this food takes the shape of ideas and the rights of man.”

“Yes, but since he has promised a Constitution,” said the Moderate Liberal, “you cannot prove that he does not mean to keep his promise.”

“I feel certain he will give some kind of a Constitution,” answered the Zemstvo representative. “I feel equally certain that it will mean nothing at all. I am not convinced for a moment that he believes in Constitutional Government for Russia. And if he disbelieves in it, why should he give it?”

“But what makes you think he disbelieves in it?” asked the Liberal.

“His present action,” remarked the student.

“His past actions,” said the Zemstvo representative. “Why did he not support Prince Mirsky’s reforms? And apart from this, has he not said in the past, again and again, that a strong autocracy is the only Government suitable for Russia?”

“He is quite right there,” said the man of business.

“Then you agree with me,” said the Zemstvo representative, “in thinking that he does not believe in a Constitution. I think myself that a capable and wise autocracy may very well be the ideal Government. But the position now is that the autocracy has for a long time past shown itself to be neither capable nor wise, and therefore the enormous majority of thinking Russians are quite determined to do away with it. ‘Absolute Princes,’ Dr. Johnson said, ‘seldom do any harm, but those who are governed by them are governed by chance.’ We are tired of being governed by chance. We may be unreasonable, but we are determined to try something else.”

“We will see,” said the man of business, “assuming what you say to be true, who is the stronger, you and your giant food of ideas and moral laws, or Count Witte and his practical sense. We have the bayonets on our side.”

“The bayonets of a defeated army,” said the Zemstvo representative. “We will see how long you will be able to sit upon them.”

“I do not pretend to be a prophet or a philosopher,” answered the man of business, “but I note certain facts; one of these is this, that ever since October I have been told by your friends that Count Witte’s position is untenable, and his resignation a question of hours. It has not come about yet. He still retains the direction of affairs. Should we meet in five years’ time I will discuss Count Witte’s policy with you. At present we are too near to it.”

“And it too far from us,” said the student.

Towards the end of this conversation, a man who belonged to no party came into the room and overheard the talk. When they had finished talking he said: “As to Witte, the question seems to me to lie in this: is he acting consciously and with foresight or is he merely making the best of chance? We are all praying for a genius to appear in Russia. But, when geniuses do come, nobody ever recognises the fact until it is too late and they are dead. If Witte is acting consciously then he is a genius indeed. If he has foreseen all along what would happen, and, in a few years’ time, is President of the Federation of Russian United States, having decentralised what he has so capably centralised, then I think he will be one of the greatest men who have ever lived; but, if he is merely acting as the occasion presents itself, I do not rate him higher than a Boulanger with a head for figures.”

“In any case,” said the Zemstvo representative, “he will provide glorious food for discussion for the future historian, and even at present the world would be a duller and greyer place without this enigmatical chameleon.”

ST. PETERSBURG, _February 17th_.

I have frequently heard the opinion expressed that the Russian Revolution can inspire nothing but disgust owing to the fact that it has produced no great men, and to its lack of big, stirring epic events, in contradistinction to the French Revolution, which was so rich in all these things. It is, therefore, interesting to note what impression the events of the French Revolution produced on impartial foreign contemporary opinion.

We derive one definite impression of the French Revolution by reading Carlyle, or Mignet, or Taine; but the foreign contemporaries who were not themselves mingled in the tragic events received a very different and far more fragmentary series of impressions. Horace Walpole, in his letters, gives us interesting glimpses into the contemporary opinion of the period. At the time of the storming of the Bastille he wrote as follows: “If the Bastille conquers, still is it impossible, considering the general spirit in the country, and the numerous fortified places in France, but some may be seized by the _dissidents_, and whole provinces be torn from the Crown? On the other hand, if the King prevails, what heavy despotism will the _États_, by their want of temper and moderation, have drawn on their country! They might have obtained many capital points, and removed great oppression. No French monarch will ever summon _États_ again if this moment has been thrown away.” It is interesting to note how doubtful he considers the success of the revolutionaries to be. Again, he adds in the same letter: “One hears of no genius on either side, nor do symptoms of any appear. There will, perhaps; such times and tempests bring forth, at least bring out, great men. I do not take the Duke of Orleans or Mirabeau to be built “du bois dont on les fait”; no, nor M. Necker. He may be a great traitor if he made the confusion designedly; but it is a woful evasion if the promised financier slips into a black politician.” A criticism similar to that passed on Necker I have myself heard applied to Count Witte on several occasions in St. Petersburg.

In July, 1790, he again returns to the charge: “Franklin and Washington were great men. None have appeared yet in France, and Necker has only returned to make a wretched figure.... Why, then, does he stay?” This is the question which the _Russ_, the anti-Governmental newspaper, is asking every day in like terms about Count Witte. In August, 1790, he says about the French: “They have settled nothing like a Constitution; on the contrary, they seem to protract everything but violence as much as they can in order to keep their louis a day.” This might be applied not without appositeness to certain of the Bureaucrats here. In September, 1791, Horace Walpole is even more pessimistic. He thinks that twenty thousand men could march from one end of France to the other. But he apprehends the possibility of enthusiasm turning to courage against a foreign enemy. What he disbelieves in is a set of “military noble lads, pedantic academicians, curates of villages, and country advocates amidst the utmost confusion and altercation amongst themselves” composing a system of government that would set four and twenty millions of people free. “This, too,” he adds, “without one great man amongst them. If they had had, as Mirabeau seemed to promise to be—but as we know that he was, too, a consummate villain, there would soon have been an end of their vision of liberty. And so there will be still, unless, after a civil war, they split into small kingdoms or commonwealths. A little nation may be free.... Millions cannot be so; because, the greater the number of men that are one people, the more vices, the more abuses there are, that will either require or furnish pretexts for restraints.” It is plain from the above quotations that whatever contemporary foreign writers thought of the French Revolution there was one thing which they did not think, and that was that the prominent actors in it were big men; or that the whole movement was anything but disgusting and futile.

Later, in 1793, Horace Walpole’s horror and disgust, as was natural, knew no bounds. He thinks, moreover, that the proceedings of the French Republicans had wounded the cause of liberty and shaken it for centuries. Now the popular atmosphere of legend that has grown up round the Revolution takes as its keynote a phrase of Victor Hugo’s: “Les hommes de 1793 étaient des géants.” In Russia we have not got so far as 1793. We are still at the beginning of 1789, and it is quite possible that the future Carlyle who writes the history of this period will say the men of 1905 were giants. The Duma will give opportunities for popular tribunes, and apart from and in contradistinction to great orators or tribunes, it may be doubted whether revolutions, while they are going on, ever produce great men. The great men come afterwards.

But when people point to the seemingly effectual repression that is now taking place here, and ask how it is possible for the Revolution to continue, they forget that there is a difference—a small but vastly important difference—between the present state of affairs and the period of the late M. Plehve’s _régime_. The difference consists in the fact that before the general strike and the October Manifesto, before even the taking of Port Arthur, Prince Mirsky opened a little window in the tight-closed room of Russian politics by relaxing the stringent Press regulations and letting loose public opinion. The light came in like a flood, and nothing can now drive it out. Repression when public opinion was crushed was a very different thing from repression when every case of it is reported in detail in the newspapers, as now happens. For people can say what they like about the unreality or the non-existence of the liberty of the Press; one has only to buy the Radical newspapers to be convinced that if the Press is not free it is certainly more explicit and more unrestrained in its violence than the Press of any other European country, and some of the comic satirical newspapers might have Marat for editor.

Somebody once said that he would have given anything in the world to have half an hour’s private interview with the late Lord Beaconsfield with a pistol, and to obtain from him under the threat of death an exact and complete account of his views and convictions. It would be interesting to perform a similar experiment on Count Witte; whatever the result of it might be, I doubt if there would be found a trace of the placid optimism which is sometimes attributed to him. Count Witte may be attacked for many things; he cannot be accused of a lack of clear-sightedness: not, that is, if he be judged by the utterances which he is known to have made before the outbreak of the war, or by those which he made publicly before entering office, and while the war was still going on. Mirabeau was, in the opinion of Horace Walpole, a ruffian; he was certainly distrusted by both parties, but we know now, though the fact escaped the notice of his contemporaries, that he gauged the forces at work and the probable trend of events with surprising accuracy. We now consider Mirabeau to have been something like a great man. Count Witte has perhaps inspired among all parties a greater distrust than that which was the lot of Mirabeau; but in times such as these clear-sightedness, self-confidence, and capacity for hard work are precious qualities indeed. Nobody denies the possession of these qualities to Count Witte. It is not, therefore, impossible that the future historian may place him in the same niche as Mirabeau in the Pantheon of the world. This, as Horace Walpole says, is speculation, not prophecy. And I revert, or rather arrive, at these conclusions, that a lull in events does not necessarily imply their final cessation; that so far in Russia revolutionary matters have succeeded one another, if anything, with greater rapidity than they did in France, and that what seems to be the unmistakable dawn of revolution to the historian may very well appear to be a false dawn to the contemporary observer; and that, whatever happens, nothing can ever shut the little window which Prince Mirsky opened.

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