book I

wrote, which was also about Russia, there was a preface in which I said that I had no political opinions and that my only object was to give a record of things seen. In spite of this Conservatives said my book was a revolutionary pamphlet, and Liberals--English Liberals of course--Russian Liberals knew better--declared it was an apology for reaction.[1] What better proof could I have had of its fundamental impartiality? But impartiality is unpopular. People prefer to see dogmatic opinions nailed like a flag to one side or the other; they cannot bear being told that both sides are right--and wrong. They do not much like being told that one is quite indifferent as to what people’s political opinions may be, because one is interested in them as human beings. In saying that such impartiality is unpopular, I have greatly understated the question. If one takes an impartial view of certain questions which inspire violent partisanship; if, for instance, one is opposed to vivisection and at the same time one has no sympathy with anti-vivisectionists--if, for instance, one believes in the innocence of Dreyfus, and the Dreyfusards inspire one with disgust, or if, as in this case, one sympathises with the Russian Liberals and yet considers that their apologists in England talk incredible nonsense--it is almost impossible to get a hearing at all. Both sides reject you, because you refuse not to admit that there are weaknesses and a certain measure of right on either side. The partisan cannot bear this to be said. His side must be altogether right, the other side must be altogether wrong; and if you venture to say that such a view is exaggerated and incomplete, you are howled down. People, and especially English people, are extraordinarily sensitive on this score (curiously enough), when a foreign country is in question. They regard every foreign country as being divided into two camps, the angels on one side, the devils on the other. In Russia the angels are all Revolutionaries, the devils are all Reactionaries. You, who have been in Russia, know that this is not the case. People in Russia, as elsewhere, are all made of the same stuff: their opinions are largely due to circumstance. But we English have a passion for meddling with other people’s business, without understanding what that business is. This is especially the case when any complex problem arises in a foreign country, such as the Dreyfus case or the Russian Revolution. Some people call this our great traditional sympathy with “nations rightly struggling to be free.” Unfortunately such sympathy being generally based on a total misapprehension of the questions at issue, very often does more harm than good. For instance, when not long ago in the House of Commons it was debated whether or no the King should pay a visit to the Emperor of Russia, and some one suggested that were the visit to be cancelled the immense majority of the Russian people would regard it as an insult, and that the Russian peasants bore no ill-will towards the Emperor, but rather complained of the results of a system of government, which in the last few years has undergone and is still undergoing radical change--when such arguments were brought forward some of the Labour Members nearly burst with ironical cheers. Here, they thought, was the voice of officialdom, Torydom, and hypocrisy speaking. Now turn to the facts. When Professor Kovolievski was elected a member for the first Duma in the government of Kharkov as an advanced Liberal member, he after his election asked some of his peasant electors whether he was not right in supposing that had he said anything offensive with regard to the Emperor at his meetings, there would have been no applause.

[1] The book is at this moment forbidden by the Censorship in Russia.

“We should not only not have applauded,” was the answer, “but we should have beaten you to death.”

And I am convinced that if any of our Labour Members went to any Russian village with an interpreter, and made speeches on the subject of the Emperor of Russia, such as they made in the House of Commons, they would swiftly be lynched. This, of course, does not mean that the Russian peasant is averse to reform, or does not suffer from the evil effects of bad government; but it means that he is a Russian, and that is a thing which our enthusiastic Liberals entirely overlook, and they overlook it because they do not know what Russia is, or what a Russian is. They are divorced from fact and soar in wide spaces of theory. And that is the reason that although all my sympathies in Russia are with the poor, and with any people who contribute a mite towards the cause of reform, the ignorance of English Liberals on the subject makes me sick.

In this book you will not find, thank Heaven, very much talk of politics. You will find, on the other hand, truthful and accurate records of real people, seen with the naked eye, unobscured by prejudice and not magnified by the spectacles of exaggeration. Also some true stories. I hope it will amuse you.

That is all I have to say about this book. Books, like every other human thing, rarely end by being what they were meant to be. The books we dream of are magnificent, interesting, exhaustive, bulky, but nevertheless not too long. They glow in the imagination like a living coal. The books we write are scrappy, short, not sufficiently interesting, and often appear to be too long in spite of their brevity. So far from glowing, they resemble the ashes of an extinct cigar. Every time one finishes a