The Tsar's Coronation/Epilogue
THE coronation, in Moscow, of Nicholas II. more destructive of wealth and more fatal to life than many a pitched battle I witnessed, not as a special correspondent bound to telegraph columns of descriptive copy day by day, but as a resident ; and having time to chew the cud of reflection, I ask myself in how far does a demoniac possession by the passions of patriotism and loyalty, such as I have witnessed here in Russia, afflict also the inhabitants of the British Empire ?
I fear that the worship of rank, wealth, and especially of royalty, in many English people amounts to an hypnotic influence, depriving them of reasoning power and of all sense of proportion. A curious instance of this occurred in a letter I received lately from a near relation of my own, who, a propos of this very coronation calamity, wrote : " The Moscow disaster has been very terrible to read about, and I feel so sorry for the Emperor and Empress." Which is as though when a house falls in, killing and maiming the members of several families, one's first thought were to feel pity for the ground landlord ! Yet it is a fair sample of the feeling expressed by many people.
A still more striking example of the same sentiment came under my notice some years ago. Another near relative of mine had an acquaintance, a Miss Wells. A Russian lady, who pronounces English rather badly, came into her room one day with the announcement, " Wales is dead ! " " What ? " cried my relation ; " the Prince of Wales is dead ? " and she burst into a flood of genuine tears for a man she had never spoken to, but cheered up promptly on discovering that it was only her friend Miss Wells who had departed this life.
Such 'loyalty' may have seemed suitable in the time of Edward the Black Prince (whose courage outweighed his cruelty in the eyes of his contemporaries), but it seems somewhat out of place when applied to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.
Again, I recollect a Canadian clergyman who took my father's duty and came to live at the parsonage for some months, when I was a boy of nine, a couple of years after the close of the Civil War in the United States. He was very friendly to me, and under his guidance my mind expanded ; on politics, however (a subject to which he introduced me), the main point he made clear to my boyish perceptions was the terrible blunder committed by the English Government in not seizing the opportunity afforded by the American War. He pointed out that by joining the Confederate States a policy in which we should have been enthusiastically supported by both Canada and France we could have broken the United States in two, and the hege- mony of the English-speaking nations would have remained with England. I accepted this teaching with faith and enthusiasm, never asking what would have been the fate of the slaves, or what I should have gained personally by an arrangement which might have condemned North America to a militarism similar to that which has since then grown like a cancer on Europe. Nor did either he or I consider how the transaction would look from the standpoint of an Eternal that loveth righteousness.
I now, thanks to the teaching of Tolstoy, see the insanity of attempting to guide the destinies of mankind on motives of expediency which run counter to the laws of morality. We have not seen the ultimate results of England's non- intervention in that war, still less can we tell what would have resulted had she fought; but we may know that no aim can justify the use of evil means, and that hatred and bloodshed are evil whether we think they tend to " establish the empire " (which is not the Kingdom of God) or not.
Yet what but my Canadian friend's conception of right and wrong can justify Palmerston's or Disraeli's policy of defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire by force or by threats ? and what will be the end of these things ? Will not "the Eternal have them in derision" ? Or what shall be said for the Christian journalists who defend [[]w:Cecil Rhodes|Cecil Rhodes]] and Dr. Jameson by quoting the example of Clive and of Warren Hastings as men once defended the slave trade by quoting the example of John Hawkins. Is the growth of our moral perceptions to be stopped until the British Empire has been sufficiently expanded to satisfy the ambition of the most inflated Englander? Who, after all, can yet tell what the final outcome of the conquest of India, of the greed that caused it and of the violence that characterised it, will be ? Does a nation's life consist in the abundance of the things it possesses ? And does an empire gain in well-being when a small minority 'make fortunes' in a distant land, and return to establish families which henceforth live, generation after generation, on the labour of their fellow-men, for whom, in exchange, they perchance make laws which con- travene, but do not surpass, the two great commandments approved by Christ ?
We grasp at what we fancy is desirable, as a baby reaches out for a knife that would cut it or a bottle that holds poison. Our pretence that we murder and steal in order to do good to less civilised nations, amounts to a declaration that the best results are obtainable, not by doing right but by doing wrong, and that as a nation we have reached a state of civilisation which we are prepared to force upon others.
And what is this civilisation which, since it does not attract the savages, is to be thrust upon them with rifles and maxim-guns ?
Is not the scramble and massacre on the Hodinskoe Field[1] the very type of what our boasted civilisation has brought us to ? The grab for enamelled mugs and bad sausages at the People's Fete was mere child's play (even with all its bloodshed) to the grab for money which year by year crushes thousands into the workhouses and prisons, and into that worst of deaths prostitution. Some unwhole- some food or petty rewards are offered, by men who never made or earned them, to those who can push hard enough to get them. A struggle ensues : each strives to be first served ; some seize several times their share but many have to go hungry ; lives are lost, property destroyed, and a festival is turned into a house of mourning
" ...where men sit and hear each other groan ; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow."
And the rich and great, whose example and guidance has led to such a result, harden their hearts like Pharaoh of old, and hasten to find occupations or amusements, to prepare which the labour and lives of the common people are again demanded.
Of the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, Jesus said : " Think ye that they were offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem ? I tell you, nay : but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." May we not say the same with reference to the three thousand who were massacred on the Hodinka ? Is not our society actuated by the same motives of greed (selfish for ourselves, selfish for our families, selfish for our nation) which led those poor peasants to their doom ? and do we not see around us misery and death caused by the industrial competition in which we share ? Within these last hundred and fifty years the productive power of man's labour has doubled and much more than doubled. Men were fed, clothed, and lodged before the steam-engine was used, the spinning-jenny, the mule, or the power-loom invented ; before the ocean was crossed by a steamer, or a locomotive had been designed, or the triumphs of applied science (that we hear so much of) had been achieved. Surely all might now be well provided for, were it not for the waste and loss in the scramble, and for the mis- direction and ill example of those who profess to lead us !
There is in England a certain old lady whom poets have panegyrised and about whom the newspapers are never tired of writing ; she is much respected, and is looked up to as an example of all the virtues ; and what she the Queen does is generally accepted as being ' the right thing.' No doubt she is morally very much superior to the average of people of her class. But what sort of example does she set in so simple and practical a matter as dressing ? A magazine lately stated that she wears silk stockings of such extreme fineness that a man has been continually engaged for many years past doing no other productive work than weave stockings for Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Defender of the Christian Faith !
How can want and poverty be avoided in a society in which people think it right and reasonable that the whole labour of a highly-skilled workman shall be devoted to pro- viding the coverings for one woman's legs ?
Think, again, of what a Queen's Drawing-Room means. Women not only dress themselves in extravagant clothes, which many people have laboured many days in poverty to produce, but men are tempted from useful work, and paid high wages to serve, together with strong, well-fed horses, in conveying these women, shut up in expensive boxes, to the drawing-room, where they will not do anything more useful than courtesy and kiss Her Most Gracious Majesty's hand. This performance is carried on repeatedly and openly, in a city where hungry people lack food, clothing and lodging to enable them to live and work ; and neither the Queen nor the newspapers, nor the people who waste their time and money at the court, seem even to suspect that there is aught to be ashamed of in the matter.
What wonder if the rest of society, from the burglar to the financier, also aim at enjoying the fruits of other men's labour, and are not particular by what means they gratify their wish ! It is as Isaiah said : " They fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour ; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom." Mother earth would yield enough for all without excessive toil or need for any to scramble, to envy, or to hate ; but the aim our competitive system sets before men namely, the out- stripping of their fellows in the race for wealth, the grasping and retaining of ' property rights ' to make ten or one hundred of our fellow-men obey our orders can only be reached by a few ; can only be held precariously and by the use of violence ; and can never be approved by any one to whom Christ's example seems admirable.
Once upon a time five thousand people went out into a wilderness to hear a favourite preacher. The day was far spent, and no regular provision had been made for their supper. Baskets were to be seen here and there, but what they contained had not been reckoned up. The preacher's own immediate followers had only five barley loaves and two fishes at hand, but with these he gave a practical lesson in economics. Letting the people sit down in companies of about fifty each, he took the five loaves and two fishes, and having blessed them he brake them and gave to the disciples, not to eat themselves but to offer to the people. The example, following on his teaching and coinciding with his known manner of life, was readily imitated. All shared what they had like members of one family ; and the food produced not only sufficed, but, each being careful for the sake of his fellows to waste nothing and to take no more than he needed, there turned out to be a superabundance ; and when they gathered up the fragments there remained twelve baskets full of provisions.
That lesson, alas ! has been forgotten or lost, owing, perchance, to slowness of understanding in evil and adulterous generations who sought after a sign.
The virtue of selfishly ' getting on ' ; the thrift which means hoarding up to-day what our brother man requires, in order to be able to compel his labour to-morrow these things have been so diligently instilled into our minds, that it needs an intellectual effort for us even to understand that if men sought first the righteousness of God's kingdom, all these things (necessaries, comforts, arts, and sciences) would be added unto us in good measure, perhaps even pressed down and running over.
Yet how evident the waste and loss of our un-Christian individualistic system is. Consider, for instance, an Insurance Company. It occupies fine premises ; has in its employ agents, correspondents, bookkeepers ; it advertises much, calculates much, does much banking, and uses up many books. The whole machine is brought to great perfection but what does it produce ? How much does it add to the wealth of the community ? Nothing at all ! It is merely one of our many elaborate and expensive contrivances for maintaining a selfish system of society. It safeguards the wealth of individuals, but it leaves the community poorer; for all the men who are unproductively engaged in it have to be fed, clothed, and lodged by the labour of workers. Think of trade secrets : manufacturers carefully hiding their processes one from another, and making goods less durable in order that they may be more saleable. Or take another instance : a merchant, trading in Eastern Siberia, finds a cheaper way of getting his goods shipped thither, but the knowledge is only profitable to him so long as he can conceal it from his com- petitors. And so it is in all the processes of trade : it would be easy to multiply examples to any extent. We are so sunk in the bog, that hardly with our utmost effort can we get out of it. But why pretend the thing is good ? Why say it is better to live in a bog than on dry ground ? Why boast so glibly of our progress and our civilisation, when we have well-nigh lost sight of the ideals which were plainly set up before men thousands of years ago ? With an art that, in its efforts to satisfy the rich, demands labour from the poor to build its studios and exhibitions and provide its materials ; with a science that is as ready to perfect instruments for human slaughter as it is to write learnedly upon the data of ethics we pride ourselves, forsooth, on our ' advance ' beyond the man who said, "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? "
And who really profits by the present system ?
Measured in money, and considering the tremendous waste, how few gain and how many lose ! Measured by any other standard than filthy lucre, among the people I know, there are none who profit : all are losers. The city man has his nervous and digestive troubles, his irritability and anxiety, and he has lost well-nigh the capacity to tell good from evil, or to be healthily interested even in his own children. His son is cut off from the natural and healthy activity helpful to others for which nature has fitted him, and is constrained by his surroundings to find an outlet for his physical energy in rushing like a lunatic after a tennis or a cricket ball, over ground carefully prepared and kept in order by the labour of working-men. The satisfaction and the moral growth which attend on service well rendered to one's fellows (which, rationally organised, in good company, might be so pleasant) is denied him : and who can say how great in its ultimate effect on mind and character that deprivation is ?
The daughter may not share the work her father and brother are to devote their lives to, nor is that work such as would be likely to attract her or any rational being ; but she is well fed, and requires an outlet for her energies till she gets married and has children, and, too often, she finds it in family quarrels, or in balls, visiting and theatre-going, or in slave-driving which is called housekeeping. Instead of using her health and ability to lighten the toil of humanity, she is, economically, a dead-weight, making the world poorer by her presence and failing to reap satisfaction for herself. This indeed is the problem which faces Dives to-day. What will you do with your sons and daughters ? Which will you stunt : their minds ? or their consciences ? For if both are allowed to develop, the day is not far off when they will feel a moral revulsion against the system you represent ; and the activity you force on the one, and the inactivity you inflict on the other, will alike be moral torture to them.
The injustice of our present system to the great bulk of humanity, who have to labour excessively, who are ill-trained, ill-taught, and ill-cared for, and for whom art and science hardly exist, is painfully obvious. If you search the registers of London churches, I am told, you will find the same family names cropping up for two or three generations and then dying off. Among the classes who do not get away to the seaside or go for long holidays to the country, three, or at most four, generations of city life destroy the family. I do not wish to underrate the importance of free picture-galleries, museums, and libraries open to ' the people/ but, in so far as they have an effect, they tend to draw more and more of the lower classes into the cities, there, as a rule, to die out. This is a most serious set-off against the good such institutions do to those who have already been engulfed by the city.
Worst of all in the indictment against our civilisation is this, that the ideal held up for men's admiration that of freedom from the obligation to toil, and the having a legal 'right' to consume extravagantly the fruits of other men's labour is a false light, luring them towards moral quick- sands. The difference which divides the economic teaching and example of respectable society from those of Jesus, is not a difference of degree only but of direction ; and before we can know whether to steer north or south in this matter, we have to make up our minds
- (1) whether Jesus meant what he taught, or whether his statements on economic
matters were mere windy verbosity " divine paradoxes," as Dean Farrar calls them ; and
- (2) supposing that he meant what he said, whether he was talking sense.
Christ did not denounce slavery, polygamy, patriotism, or pride of race or of family, because the forms under which man exploits his brother man, and the excuses whereby he justifies his conduct to himself and to others, can be endlessly varied ; but he struck at the root of the whole matter by appealing to the heart of man. He proclaimed the brother- hood of man, and said that to whom much (whether in capacity, in strength, or in means) has been given, from him much shall be required.
The world, age after age, tries other lines : claims ' rights ' for the skilful, clever, strong, or lucky, and for their descend- ants after them. But these experiments, such as slavery or feudalism, have broken down in the past, and to-day indi- vidualism and the competitive system of production are on their trial, and they too seem to be breaking down. Some faith in them still exists, and holds the system together. You may still meet people who talk about wealth being the reward of industry, and poverty being always the merited reward of idleness ; but year by year it requires an increasing degree of obtuseness to enable a man to talk in that way without conscious hypocrisy. Mill's indictment of society remains unanswered and unanswerable : it is evidently wrong that " the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so on in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life." And, as he rightly says: "If this or communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of communism, would be but as dust in the balance."[2]
" Well," says a friend, " but granting that things are not as they should be, we are at any rate progressing. This very coronation shows how much worse the Government of Russia is than that of England, and progress in the future must go along the same lines as in the past."
The case seems to be this. The English Government is in closer touch with the people than the Russian Government is. No doubt, in England as in Russia, the rich and educated make the laws, chiefly for their own advantage ; but in England they have to reckon with the whims, the passions, and the opinions of an active and audible section of the people who occupy themselves with politics. The sins of the English Government are therefore, in a sense, the sins of the people. In Russia the case is different. An autocratic Government blunders along, not asking advice, resenting criticism, pretending to infallibility, and even trying to dic- tate to its subjects what they may read and what they must believe. The failure of representative Governments, in England, France, and America, to free men from the yoke that greed and selfishness have put upon them, to divide the fruits of labour more equally, or to make men happier, prevents such faith from growing up in Russia as gave the revolutionary movements of a century or two ago their force in those other countries.
Far be it from me to underrate the service to humanity of those true men who strove for political emancipation, and who kept alive in the hearts of men the sacred hope of a coming time when truth and justice should reign on earth ; but is it not obvious, for instance, that the great Reform Bill of 1832 has not done what Macaulay and his contemporaries hoped from it ? How different are its effects to those of the agita- tion led by Christ, which did not aim at any one special practical political change, and yet the echoes of which, last- ing through the ages, have inspired, and will yet inspire, re- formers in all lands. The agitation for a Reform or a Home Rule Act concentrates and buries itself in one object, which is accomplished to our disappointment, or perhaps never is accomplished at all.
The line of advance in Russia may lie, not in upsetting the Government but in ignoring it What is desirable is, not that another and a better Pougatchef should dethrone the Emperor and declare a Constitution, but that men should open their minds to what is true, and, seeing the right, should " obey God rather than men."
Take the example of Prince Hilkof. Finding by actual experience how impossible it was for him, living as a rich man, to ' do good ' to the labourers on his estate in the Kharkof government, to gain their confidence, or to set them any useful example ; and seeing that this was necessarily so as long as he demanded from them labour that he might live sumptuously, he gave up his land to the peasant commune, and began to live as nearly as possible like one of them. His influence then became great. Seeing that in plain practical matters they were the better and not the worse off for his life, the people came to him for religious guidance also, which he and they found in the Gospels, reading simply " like little children " ; looking for what was plain and clear, and practically applicable to the guidance of the life we are all living. Looked at in this way, the stress and emphasis of Christ's teaching did not appear to lie in the announcement of a mysterious Trinity, or in a theory of Redemption by blood, or in the founding of an infallible Church, or in the institution of any rites or ceremonies, but in the inculcation of love and goodwill among men, who are all sons of one Father ; a sonship that should be practically shown by burdening others as little as possible, and doing as much as possible ourselves : devoting one's talents, not to the service of mammon but to the service of righteousness.
This view, being totally different from that taught by the Holy Orthodox Russian Church, caused the peasants to cease going to church, and also caused the revenues of the village priests to shrink ; and, Church and State leaning upon each other for mutual support, a persecution was commenced, and Prince Hilk6f was exiled to the Caucasus. There he fell in with the Doukhobors, whose views coincided with his own- and after a time the authorities found it advisable to re-exile him to an out-of-the-way part of the Baltic Provinces.[3] His children have been taken from him, to be brought up in the true religion professed by Pobedonostsef and the Most Holy Synod.
The English Government would not have persecuted Prince Hilkof; but, on the other hand, have we a Prince Hilkof to persecute? How does the activity of our most Radical peers compare with his? Not, of course, that such men are common in Russia either ; but among the Russian peasants there are many who, though they have not had to renounce so much, see things eye to eye with Hilkof. Such men would neither put up a fence to protect private property in land, nor serve as soldiers or policemen to en- force ' legal rights,' nor be lawyers to plead the cause of those who can pay for it, nor judges to administer iniquitous laws, nor politicians to set an example of quarrelling where what is wanted is an example of useful and self-sacrificing work, nor priests claiming an endowment and petrifying the beliefs of one age to check the spiritual advance of the next.
There are two different and incompatible lines of advance. One is that followed, say, by Gladstone (to take a prominent instance), which is that of aiming at immediate practical results by legal enactments. It may not be always useless, but what is made legal is not always right and what is made illegal is not always wrong ; it generates much friction, is disappointing in its results, and sets no example which all men can follow. It is a line which can, indeed, hardly be pursued except by men who have divorced themselves from the universal duty of man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. The other line, followed by such men as Paul, Wyclif, or George Fox, and most conspicuously by Jesus, is that of doing what is right and speaking what is true, leaving the results to be enforced, not by the policeman but by the Eternal. Who can ever measure or tell what results have followed, or will follow, from any action or example ? Is it not better to leave the calculations of expediency to those who do not believe that truth is great and shall prevail ?
Even on a lower plane, do we not see that the quiet and thoughtful work of Adam Smith, for instance, has had far more wide-reaching effects, even in the making and altering of laws, than the labours of six hundred and seventy members of Parliament, with all their election committees and political campaigns, for the last ten years ? And, however much the influence of the advance of the physical sciences on the happiness of the human race has been overrated, is it not certain that Newton and Darwin have done more to liberate mankind from the thraldom of an ignorant and bigoted priesthood than could be effected by a dozen church-dis- establishment bills ?
But "What is truth?" asks, not Pilate only but all thoughtful men who have pierced to the heart of the materialistic philosophy of the day, hoping in it to find solid ground to build on.
God, say they, is a reflection of himself which man has cast upon the clouds. Granted that there may be a great first cause of all things, we can know nothing of it, and must leave it completely out of our reckoning. What we can know is matter and its movements ; what can be known of higher forms of life towards which man may be tending must be learnt by studying the evolution of lower forms which he has already surpassed. Morality is a question of expediency : it is one thing for the ants, another for the bees, and a dozen different things for man, according to his race and climate and surroundings. Do not, therefore, elevate your whims and guesses and fancies into the decrees of an " Eternal who makes for righteousness."
That is about as far as the materialistic philosopher cares to go in his public speech or writings ; it is perhaps as far even as some of them care to penetrate in their own thoughts. But get an intellectually honest and sincere materialist, who will not shirk the issue (nor, like so many intellectually dishonest Christians, simply refuse to discuss his beliefs), and you come to something further, which marks the real dividing line between a thoroughly consistent materialist and a spiritualist (if I may use that word to denote one who thinks that conscience and reason afford indications of eternal truth). The consistent materialist will say that what we see around us is a huge evolutionary process tending we know not whence or whither, that we cannot stop it, and whether we go against it and are wiped out, or go with it and are wiped out, does not really seem to matter much ; for the power will certainly destroy first you and me, then the human race and the earth itself, and eventually the whole solar system to which we belong. All our morality is but relative ; probably there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong, and no such thing as moral truth or false- hood, or, if there be, we are probably quite incapable of grasping them.
That, really, is the root of the whole matter. Is anything true ? Is anything right or wrong ?
We may, with the thoroughgoing materialist, assume that there are no such things as righteousness or moral truth (indeed, accepting his assertion that conscience gives us no perception of the Eternal, I do not see how that conclusion can logically be avoided) ; and having assumed that, it does not seem to matter much what else we assume for the short remainder of our days. Or we may take up the spiritual hypothesis that there is an eternal right, a truth leading towards it, and that our minds and consciences are so framed that if we are intellectually honest, and strive to act up to what we know, we can obtain such glimpses of these eternal truths as are needful to enable us to steer our course aright through our brief sojourn here.
The distant mountain does not look the same to all eyes or from all points of view, but it is one and the same, and we can approach towards it if we will.
One of these two conclusions the thoughtful man who goes unflinchingly to the heart of the matter must ultimately reach, even if he first takes it on trial merely, as a working hypothesis. Afterwards by its fruits shall ye judge it. Once assume that we dwell, not in a chaos but in a universe designed for objects which transcend our comprehension, and one can work quietly at what the great Taskmaster sets before us. Expediency and tangible success lose their importance, and even death for ourselves and extinction for our race, cease to be the inexplicable curse from the very thought of which we sought to escape.
Now, to return to the coronation. No one I have met attempts to justify it as reasonable, right, or necessary in itself : the sham and tinsel of the whole affair was too obvious ; but many try to explain that it was expedient or necessary, as being likely to impress the people or the foreign visitors. Some Russians thought it would favour- ably impress foreigners, and some foreigners excused it as necessary to impress the semi-savage delegates from Asiatic Russia. What was especially noticeable, however, was the disinclination of most people to consider anything more than the mere surface of the event. The thought, lurking at the back of their minds, seemed to be : If we admit that our social system is founded on selfishness and wrong, and that the Government exists in order that the rich may oppress the poor, what will happen ? what have we to put in place of the present system ?
Well, whether we speak the truth or whether we lie, whether we worship God or mammon, we none of us know what will happen ; we can, however, see the past more clearly than the future. Suppose, then, that a Roman slave- owner had realised that though Paul wrote " Slaves, obey your masters," yet slavery was wrong. He would have been tempted to ask, " But how will the abolition of slavery work ?
Who will ever labour at slavish tasks, unless a whip is held over him ? " He would be apt to say, " Even with con- tinual flogging, my slaves can hardly be got to do a decent day's work, any of them." And he would ask, " How, for instance, can woollen cloth ever get made if there are no slaves to pasture the sheep, or to shear them or wash them, or make the fleeces into bundles, or spin it into yarn, or weave it into cloth, or dye it ? " Had he tried to forecast in his mind what a modern Yorkshire mill would be like, he would have failed completely. Yet the conclusion presented by his conscience was right. Slavery was bad, economically as well as morally ; and the emancipation of slaves has not impoverished the world nor left us without cloth.
In such problems, the question of conscience and motive is the one we are capable of forming a sound judgment on, not the question of the results of actions. And whether we believe that conscience is a guide to be consulted and followed, depends again on whether we believe that there is a Power " lasting through the ages, which makes for righteousness " and which acts upon us.
As to the moral revolution which is now fermenting in many lands, especially with regard to economic questions, it can neither be helped nor hindered by shams and lies and surely, as to this revolution, it behoves all men to take heed what side they are on ; for " if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be overthrown ; but if it be of God, ye will not be able to overthrow it ; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God."
NEMTCHfNOVSKY POST,
near Moscow, Junt 1896.
- ↑ 1 Fields near Moscow, where, as part of the Coronation Festivities, on 18th May 1896 (O.S.), a People's Fete was held, at which some 3000 people perished.
- ↑ J. S. Mill, Political Economy, People's edition, p. 128.
- ↑ Since the above was written he has been allowed to leave Russia (but not to return thither), and has taken an active part in settling the Doukhobdrs in Canada.