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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
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