people cannot cease to be aware of the cause of the calamities they suffer, or cease to desire to free themselves from it.
Besides, the Russian people cannot continue to submit to the Government, because now a Government—such a Government as gives security and tranquillity to a nation—no longer exists in reality. There are two envenomed and contending parties, but no Government to which it is possible quietly to submit.
For Russians now to continue to submit to their Government, would mean to continue not only to bear the ever-increasing calamities which they have suffered and are suffering: land-hunger, famine, heavy taxes, cruel, useless and devastating wars; but also and chiefly it would mean taking part in the crimes this Government, in its evidently useless attempts at self-defence, is now perpetrating.
Still less reasonable would it be for the Russian people to enter on the path of the Western nations, since the deadliness of that path is already plainly demonstrated. It would be evidently irrational for the Russian nation to act so; for though it was possible for the Western nations, before they knew where it would lead them, to choose a path now seen to be false, the Russian people cannot help seeing and knowing its danger.
Moreover, when they entered on that path, most of the Western people were already living by trade, exchange and commerce, or by direct (negro) or indirect slave-owning (as is now the case in Europe's Colonies) while the Russian nation is chiefly agricultural. For the Russian people to enter on the path along which the Westerners went, would mean consciously to commit the same acts of violence that the Government demands of it (only not for the Government, but against it): to rob, burn, blow up, murder, and carry on civil war; and to commit all these crimes knowing that it does so no longer in obedience to another's will, but at its own. And they would at last attain only what has been attained by the Western nations after centuries of struggle; they would go on suffering the same chief ills that they now suffer from: land-hunger, heavy and ever-increasing taxes, national
