depravity is so great that it would shock the English people if translated into proper English equivalents,"[1] but among these men and women, nevertheless, are some of the best, bravest, and most generous types of manhood and womanhood that I have ever known. I am linked to them only by the ties of sympathy, humanity, or friendship; but I wish that I were bound to them by the tie of kindred blood. I should be proud of them if they were my brothers and sisters, and so long as any of them live they may count upon me for any service that a brother can render.
The last of the three classes into which I have divided the anti-Government party in Russia comprises the terrorists. A recent writer in the Russian historical magazine Rússkaya Stariná, in a very instructive paragraph, describes them, and the attitude of the Russian people towards them, as follows:
We have been present at a strange spectacle. Before our eyes there has taken place something like a duel between the mightiest Power on earth armed with all the attributes of authority on one side, and an insignificant gang of discharged telegraph operators, half-educated seminarists, high-school boys and university students, miserable little Jews and loose women on the other; and in this apparently unequal contest success was far from being on the side of strength. Meanwhile the immense mass of the people who without doubt spontaneously loved the serene [svétloi] personality of the Tsar, and were sincerely devoted to law and order, and to the embodiment of law and order in the form of monarchical institutions, stood aside and watched this duel in the capacity of uninterested, if not indifferent, observers. We have called this a "strange spectacle," but it ought, with more justice, to be characterized as a shameful spectacle. It was only necessary for the great mass of the Russian people to move — to "shake its shoulders," as the saying is — and the ulcer that had appeared on the body of the social organism would have vanished as completely as if it never had existed. Why this saving movement was not made we
- ↑ Interview of the chief of the Russian prison administration with the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London Times.— Chicago Inter Ocean, March 16, 1890.
