organize massacres against hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of Jews—that fact is sufficient to prove how easy it would be to turn the popular passions against the revolutionists. Indeed, if the revolutionary spirit were spreading, and if famine were to be the result of anarchy, nothing would be easier than to make the peasants believe that it is the Jews and the landowners who are responsible for the evil, and that it is they who interfered with the good intentions of the Tsar: in which case there would not be one peasant insurrection like the Vendée, but twenty sporadic outbursts all over the Empire.[1]
(b) In 1789, the French Church—with its Court Abbés, with its Rohans and its Talleyrands—was utterly discredited. In Russia the Church seems to have retained its hold over the peasantry. The Russian people are, as I have shown, the most religious nation in the world, as one would expect from people on whom life has always pressed hard, and who must seek in their beliefs an opiate against their sufferings. Even irreligion in Russia retains all the earnest-
- ↑ This forecast has been only too fully verified in the epidemic of pogroms which are a blot on the Russian name and which continues unabated during the present war.
