mon brigand. The law may deal primarily with actions, and pay little attention to motives, but in estimating character from the historical point of view motives must be taken fully into account. Madam Dubróva was arrested the first time — before she was eighteen years of age — for going with Madam Róssikova into a peasant village on an errand that was as purely and generously philanthropic as that of the educated young women from New England who went South during the reconstruction era to teach in negro schools. From that time forward she was regarded as a political suspect, and was harried and harassed by the authorities, and exasperated by unjust treatment of herself and her friends until, under the dominating influence of Madam Róssikova — a character of the true John Brown type — she became a terrorist. Like many other young Russians of ardent nature and imperfect acquaintance with the history of man's social and political experiments, she acted sometimes upon erroneous conceptions of duty or mistaken ideas of moral justification; but for this again the Russian Government itself is responsible. Upon the pretense of guarding the moral character of its young people and shielding them from the contagion of "seditious" ideas, it deprives them of the knowledge that is necessary to guide them in dealing with the problems of life, sets them an example of lawlessness by punishing them for social activity that is perfectly innocent and legal, and then, having exasperated them into crime by injustice and cruelty, holds them up to the world as monsters of depravity. I have been accused by Russian officials of idealizing the characters of the political exiles; but when the history of the latter half of the nineteenth century shall have been written, it will be found, I think, that my portraits of the Russian revolutionists, necessarily imperfect and sketchy as they must be, are much more like the originals than are the caricatures of human beings left on record by the prosecuting attorneys of the Crown in their political speeches and indictments.
