TO THE EDITOR OF FREE RUSSIA,--I thank you for the compliment of your
invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on
your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of
the objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite
know how to proceed. Let me quote here the paragraph referred to:
“But men's hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for
a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting
to a dire fate they cannot escape. Besides, foreigners could not see so
clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the
grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the
moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated
Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners
are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of
no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity
against Russian tyranny. And the Tzar's Government, stupidly confident
in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning
from the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the
aggravation of brutalities. Not satisfied with slowly killing its
prisoners, and with burying the flower of our young generation in the
Siberian desserts, the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break
their spirit by deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of
brutality and degradation.”
When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan's
revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly
figures fail to typify the Czar's government, and that one must descend
into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement
of the objects of the several liberation-parties--and is disappointed.
Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell
entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.
I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of
the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.
Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it
differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it
somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and
fine, when properly “modified,” something entitling it to protection
from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It
seems a most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition
that man is a reasoning being. If a house is afire, we reason
confidently that it is the first comer's plain duty to put the fire out
in any way he can--drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use
any and all means to stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of
the city. What is the Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of
a city of eighty millions of inhabitants? Yet instead of extinguishing
him, together with his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all
anxious to merely cool him down a little and keep him.
It seems to me that this is illogical--idiotic, in fact. Suppose you had
this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house,
chasing the helpless women and little children--your own. What would
you do with him, supposing you had a shotgun? Well, he is loose in your
house-Russia. And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to
think up ways to “modify” him.
Do these liberation-parties think that they can succeed in a project
which has been attempted a million times in the history of the world and
has never in one single instance been successful--the “modification” of
a despotism by other means than bloodshed? They seem to think they can.
My privilege to write these sanguinary sentences in soft security was
bought for me by rivers of blood poured upon many fields, in many lands,
but I possess not one single little paltry right or privilege that come
to me as a result of petition, persuasion, agitation for reform, or any
kindred method of procedure. When we consider that not even the most
responsible English monarch ever yielded back a stolen public right
until it was wrenched from them by bloody violence, is it rational to
suppose that gentler methods can win privileges in Russia?
Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne
would be by revolution. But it is not possible to get up a revolution
there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne
vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with
thanks. Then organize the Republic. And on the whole this method has
some large advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives
which cannot well be spared, the dynamite way doesn't. Consider this:
the conspirators against the Czar's life are caught in every rank of
life, from the low to the high. And consider: if so many take an
active part, where the peril is so dire, is this not evidence that the
sympathizers who keep still and do not show their hands, are countless
for multitudes? Can you break the hearts of thousands of families with
the awful Siberian exodus every year for generations and not eventually
cover all Russia from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers
and brothers and sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator of this
prodigious crime and hunger and thirst for his life? Do you not believe
that if your wife or your child or your father was exiled to the mines
of Siberia for some trivial utterances wrung from a smarting spirit by
the Czar's intolerable tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did
not do it, that you would always be ashamed to be in your own society
the rest of your life? Suppose that that refined and lovely Russian lady
who was lately stripped bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped to
death by the Czar's hand in the person of the Czar's creature had been
your wife, or your daughter or your sister, and to-day the Czar should
pass within reach of your hand, how would you feel--and what would you
do? Consider, that all over vast Russia, from boundary to boundary,
a myriad of eyes filled with tears when that piteous news came, and
through those tears that myriad of eyes saw, not that poor lady, but
lost darlings of their own whose fate her fate brought back with new
access of grief out of a black and bitter past never to be forgotten or
forgiven.
If I am a Swinburnian--and clear to the marrow I am--I hold human nature
in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians
that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn't.