facts with absolute certainty: in the first place, because the peasants have not the same means of expressing their feelings as the intellectual classes; in the second place, because for any information we possess we almost exclusively depend on the revolutionists themselves who control the European Press, and with whom the wish is father both to the thought and to the deed. We, therefore, can only judge from inference and arrive at probabilities.
But in support of the probable loyalty of the moujik I would submit the following important considerations:
(1) Loyalty has been for generations a religious tradition, and almost an instinct with the Russian peasantry, and such instincts have a very tough life in them, especially in a slow, patient, passive being like the moujik. After the disaster to the Russian fleet in 1905, I visited many villages in every part of the Empire. The image of the Tsar was still hanging in every izba with the icons of the saints. The peasants remember the broad fact that Tsardom has ever been on their side, and that whilst they owe their servitude and the kriepostnoe pravo to the aristocracy, they are indebted for their freedom to the Tsar liberator
