206 ESSAYS AND LEITERS
despotism, and capital punishment inflicted without trial— murder. You wish to organize Cadet Corps, or Classical High Schools in which military exercises and the Orthodox Faith are taught : that is your affair, but we will not teach in such schools, nor send our children to them, but will educate our children as seems to us right. You decide to reduce the Local Governments to impotence : we will not take part in them. You prohibit the publication of literature that displeases you : you may seize books and punish the printers, but ycu cannot prevent our speaking and writing, and we shall continue to do so. You demand an oath of allegiance to the Tsar : we will not accede to what is so stupid, false, and degrading. You order us to serve in the army : we will not do so, because wholesale murder is as opposed to our conscience as individual murder, and, above all, because to promise to murder whomsoever a commander may tell us to murder is the meanest act a man can commit. You profess a religion which is a thousand years behind the times, with an '*^ Iberian Mother of God ^'"^ relics, and coronations : that is your affair, but we do not acknowledge idolatry and superstition to be religion, but call them idolatry and superstition, and we try to free people from them.'
And what can the Government do against such activity } It can banish or imprison a man for prepar- ing a bomb, or even for printing a proclamation to working men ; it can transfer your Literature Com- mittee from one Ministry to another, or close a Parlia- ment ; but what can a Government do with a man who is not willing publicly to lie with uplifted hand, or who is not willing to send his children to an establishment which he considers bad, or who is not willing to learn to kill people, or is not willing to take part in idolatry, or is not willing to take part in coronations, deputa-
- ' The Iberian Mother of God ' in Moscow is a wonder-
working icon of the Virgin Mary, which draws a large revenue. It is frequently taken to visit the sick, and travels about with six horses ; the attendant priest sits in the carriage bareheaded.
