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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
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