The truth, as everybody knows who knows Russia, is that “barbarous,” the
classic taunt of the German against Russia, is, of all words, the least
proper as a description of the Russian mind and character. I have
myself been only once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and under
conditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happened
since down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russian
soul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, I
travelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns
of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death
darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the
plague spots where men’s lives were being mown down at the devastating
stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men’s hearts, the nerve,
courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and
consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under
the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living
in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit
came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short
as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had
been with them when their very souls lay bare.
What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I
saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly
housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate;
but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we
mean the “will to life” which animates the savage man. And I now say,
with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that
can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened
of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast
country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity
there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the
dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the
number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liège
are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.