Henceforth the friction between Vienna and Belgrade has been permanent, though often latent. It was accentuated by the fact that King Milan was little better than an Austrian agent, the most notorious example of this being the ill-considered and ill-managed war with Bulgaria into which he plunged Serbia at the instigation of the Ballplatz[1](1885). Afterwards, it is true, Vienna intervened to rob the Bulgarians of the fruits of victory and argued that Serbia was thus under her debt; but this crass application of the principle of divide et impera could not deceive any one. Milan was a man of great ability, but vicious and corrupt. The ceaseless scandals of his private life, the frequent political coups d'etat in which he indulged, tended to confirm the dislike of his subjects for the Austrophilism with which he was identified. Alexander, his son and successor, was even worse; indeed, it is not too much to say that he was the most "impossible" monarch whom Europe has known since the days of the Tsar Paul. His court was characterised by gross favouritism and arbitrary revisions of the constitution; and his position became finally untenable when he committed the fatal error of marrying Draga Mashin, a woman of no position and notorious private character. Two incidents in her tragic story remind us of similar scandals in English history—the fond delusion of Mary Tudor and the legend of Mary of Modena's warming-pan. The last straw was the design, widely attributed to her and the infatuated king, for securing the succession to her brother, who had as little claim to the throne as any other Serbian subject. On June 10, 1903, Alexander and Draga were assassinated by a gang of Serbian officers, under circumstances of the utmost brutality such as nothing can excuse. In the light of recent events, however, it is important to note that both Austria and Russia knew of the plot at least ten days before the murder and did nothing to stop it.[2] On the day after the crime the Fremdenblatt, the organ of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, published a leading article couched in terms of the utmost cynicism, and declaring that it mattered little to Austria-Hungary which dynasty reigned in Serbia. The Serbian Government might have been excused for enclosing a copy of this article in its reply to the Austrian Note of July 23, 1914!

[Footnote 1: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office.]

[Footnote 2: In 1908 this was confirmed to me by a distinguished member of the then Austrian Cabinet, since dead, who was certainly in a position to know.]

The Obrenovitch dynasty was thus at an end. Its rival, the Karageorgevitch dynasty, returned to power—naturally under a black cloud of European disgust and suspicion. King Peter is not, however, as black as he has sometimes been painted. He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as a young man he translated Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty into Serb, and for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris. Under him Serbia has for the first time enjoyed real constitutional government. Quietly, as occasion arose, the regicides were removed to the background, the old methods of favouritism were steadily discouraged, and it is not too much to say that an entirely new atmosphere has been created in Belgrade since 1903. Among the younger politicians in Serbia, as in other Slavonic countries, the moral influence of Professor Masaryk, the great Czech philosopher and politician, has grown more and more marked.

The depth of Serb aspirations in Bosnia has two obvious grounds—on the one hand, pure national sentiment of the best kind; on the other, the urgent economic need for a seaboard, Serbia being the only inland country in Europe save Switzerland, and not enjoying the latter's favoured position in the immediate vicinity of great world-markets. Austria-Hungary, on her part, set herself deliberately not merely to block this access to the sea, but also to keep Serbia in complete economic dependence. Under the new dynasty the little kingdom showed a keener desire to shake off its vassalage and find new markets. The so-called "Pig War"—the breeding of swine is Serbia's staple industry, and the founders of her two rival dynasties were wealthy pig-breeders—proved an unexpected success, for new trade outlets were found in Egypt and elsewhere. But the initial strain hit every peasant in his pocket and thus greatly accentuated the feeling against Austria-Hungary. At this stage came the Young Turk revolution and its sequel, the annexation of Bosnia. To any impartial observer it had been obvious from the first that those who dreamt of Austria-Hungary's voluntary withdrawal from the two provinces were living in a fool's paradise. The formal act of annexation merely set a seal to thirty years of effective Austrian administration, during which the Sultan's rule had been confined to the official celebration of his birthday. Educational and agrarian problems had been neglected, popular discontent had smouldered, but at least great material progress had been made. Roads, railways, public buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new machine of government had been constructed. Austria had come to stay, and Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting the seal to a document which had been signed a generation earlier. He had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of international law evoked: like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind faith in "scraps of paper," and had no scruple in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin on which the whole Balkan settlement had rested. Nowhere was the outburst of feeling so violent as in Serbia and Montenegro, who had never ceased to dream of the lost Serb provinces. For some months the two little States challenged the accomplished fact, and seemed bent on staking their very existence upon war with the great neighbouring Monarchy. Aehrenthal remained unmoved by their cries of impotent fury and settled down to a trial of strength with his rival Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, who encouraged the sister Slavonic States in their resistance. At length in March 1909 Germany stepped forward in "shining armour" to support her Austrian ally, and Russia, to avoid European war, gave way and abandoned the Serbs to their fate. Nothing was left but a humiliating submission: the Serbian Government was obliged to address a Note to the Great Powers, declaring that the annexation and internal condition of Bosnia did not in any way concern her.[1]

[Footnote 1: This declaration was made the basis of the Austrian Note to Serbia in July 1914.]

Sec.5. The Renaissance of Serbia.—From this diplomatic defeat dates the renaissance of Serbia. It restored her to a sense of hard realities, and taught her to substitute hard work for loud talk. So rough a challenge put the national spirit on its mettle. The brief period between 1908 and 1912 worked a real transformation in Belgrade, which could not fail to impress those who took the trouble to look beneath the surface. Nowhere was the change more marked than in the Serbian army, from which the regicide elements had been slowly but steadily eliminated. The two Balkan wars of 1912-1913 revealed Serbia to the outside world as a military power, notable alike for the elan of its infantry, the high efficiency of its artillery, the close camaraderie of officers and men. The first use made of her victories over the Turks was the occupation of northern Albania, her only possible outlet to the sea so long as Dalmatia remains in Austrian hands. Austria-Hungary, who had only remained inactive because she had taken a Turkish victory for granted, now intervened, and by the creation of an artificial Albanian State vetoed Serbia's expansion to the Adriatic. The Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, short-sighted and indolent then as now, failed to realise that the North Albanian harbours, for obvious reasons of physical geography, could never be converted into naval bases, save at a prohibitive cost, and that their possession by Serbia, so far from being a menace to Austria, would involve the policing of a mountainous tract of country, inhabited by a turbulent and hostile population. It ought to have been obvious to him that the moment had arrived for tempting the Serbs into the Austrian sphere of influence by the bait of generous commercial concessions through Bosnia and Dalmatia. Several far-sighted politicians in Austria urged this course upon him, and the Serbian Premier actually approached Vienna with far-reaching proposals in this very sense. Their contemptuous rejection by Berchtold and the little clique of Foreign Office officials who controlled his puppet figure, naturally strengthened still further the bonds which united Belgrade and Petrograd. Serbia, shut out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. These facts alone would justify the assertion that the war between the Balkan allies was directly due to Austro-Hungarian initiative; but it has also transpired that the dissensions between Sofia and Belgrade were actively encouraged from Vienna, that Magyar influences were brought to bear upon King Ferdinand, and that war material was sent down the Danube from Hungary to Bulgaria. The outward and visible sign of these intrigues was a speech of the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, opposing the Tsar's intervention in favour of peace and virtually inciting Bulgaria to fight it out. The break-up of the Balkan League was the first condition to that Austrian advance on Salonica which has always remained the ideal of the advocates of a forward policy in Vienna and Budapest, and which lies at the root of Austria-Hungary's action in provoking the present war.

Serbia and Montenegro, however, are but one half of the problem. The issues involved are wider and deeper than the quarrels of Vienna and Budapest with Belgrade. Even if every man in Serbia were willingly prostrate before the Habsburg throne, there could be no real peace until the internal problem of Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav provinces is solved. What is at stake is the future of eleven million people, inhabiting the whole tract of country from sixty miles north of Trieste to the centre of Macedonia, from the southern plains of Hungary to the North Albanian frontier. Of these, roughly four millions are in the two independent kingdoms; the remaining seven millions are divided between Austria (the provinces of Dalmatia, Istria, and Carniola) and Hungary (the autonomous kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia), while Bosnia-Herzegovina are governed jointly by Austria and Hungary. The history of these provinces during the past generation is one of neglect and misgovernment. Croatia has been exploited economically by the Magyars, and the narrow interests of Budapest have prevented railway development and hampered local industries by skilful manipulation of tariffs and taxation. A further result is that even to-day Dalmatia (with the exception of Ragusa) has no railway connections with the rest of Europe, and those of Bosnia are artificially directed towards Budapest rather than towards Agram, Vienna, and Western Europe. It is not too much to say that the situation of those provinces had become less favourable (if compared with surrounding standards) than it was at earlier periods of their history; for the old system of trade-routes had broken down there as elsewhere in Europe, but had not been replaced by modern communications.

Sec.6. Serbo-Croat Unity.—Parallel with the new era instituted in Serbia since 1903, a strong movement in favour of national unity took root among her kinsmen across the Austro-Hungarian frontier. The disruptive tendencies which had hitherto been so marked in Croatian politics began to weaken. The so-called Serbo-Croat Coalition round which all the younger elements speedily rallied, put forward an ambitious programme of constructive democratic reform as the basis of joint political action on the part of both races, and held stubbornly together when the inevitable breach with the Magyar oligarchy occurred. The Magyar Government felt that every effort must be made to restore that discord between Croat and Serb which had been for a generation one of the main pillars of their racial hegemony. These designs happened to coincide with the aims of the Foreign Office in Vienna in connection with the annexation of Bosnia, and Budapest and Vienna combined in a systematic campaign of persecution against the Serbs of Croatia. "Wholesale arrests and charges of treason led up to the monster trial at Agram, which dragged on for seven months amid scandals worthy of the days of Judge Jeffreys. The Diet ceased to meet, the constitution of Croatia was in abeyance, the elections were characterised by corruption and violence such as eclipsed even the infamous Hungarian elections of 1910; the Press and the political leaders were singled out for special acts of persecution and intimidation." These tactics were revealed to the outside world in the notorious Friedjung Trial (December 1909), resulting out of a libel action brought by the Serbo-Croat Coalition leaders against Dr. Friedjung, the distinguished Austrian historian. The documents, on the basis of which he had publicly accused them of being paid agents of the Serbian Government, had been supplied to him by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, and the trial revealed them as impudent forgeries, concocted in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Belgrade! The moral responsibility for these forgeries was subsequently brought home to Count Forgach, the Minister in Belgrade, and indirectly, of course, to Count Aehrenthal himself as Foreign Minister. But Forgach, though publicly denounced as "Count Azev,"[1] was not allowed to fall into disgrace; on the contrary, he had become within two years of his exposure permanent Under-Secretary at the Ballplatz, and inspirer of new plots to discredit and ruin Serbia.

[Footnote 1: An allusion to the notorious Russian agent provocateur who was at one and the same time a member of the secret police and of the revolutionary organisation.]

The scandals of the Friedjung Trial led to the fall of the Governor of Croatia, but there was no change of system. After a temporary truce the old conflict revived, and within eighteen months the friction between Magyars and Croats was as acute as ever. The Magyar Government employed every possible device of administrative pressure in order to create dissensions between the Croat and Serb parties—repeated elections, wholesale corruption and violence, persecution of the Press and of the political leaders. Yet so far from languishing under such a system, the movement for unity gained fresh strength and extended to the kindred Slovenes, striking root even among the extreme Clericals, who had hitherto regarded the Orthodox Serbs with distrust and suspicion.

In the spring of 1912 the conflict culminated in the abolition of the Croatian constitution by the arbitrary decree of the Hungarian Premier, in the appointment of a reactionary official as dictator, and a few months later in the suspension of the charter of the Serb Orthodox Church.

Sec.7. The Balkan Wars.—Never in history had a more inopportune moment been chosen for such crying illegalities. For close upon the heels of the demonstrations and unrest which they evoked, came the dramatic events of the Balkan War, the crushing victories of the allies, the resurrection of the lost Serb Empire, the long-deferred revenge for the defeat of Kosovo. The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs. Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across the frontier. I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross, offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could spare from their scanty belongings. The total subscriptions raised among the Southern Slavs of the Monarchy in aid of the allies far exceeded any sums previously raised for charitable purposes among so poor a population. "In the Balkan sun," said a prominent Croat Clerical, "we see the dawn of our day."

The national rejoicings which "the avenging of Kosovo" evoked among the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary were accompanied by lively protests against the bare idea of an Austro-Serbian war, which, so far as the Southern Slavs on both sides of the frontier were concerned, would have been a civil war in the most literal sense of the word (and this civil war, it must be remembered, is now actually being waged). The politicians, however, though well-nigh unanimous in their enthusiasm for the cause of the Balkan allies, could not at one breath throw off the habits of a lifetime. Petty jealousies still divided them and were skilfully played upon by the Magyar Government. The strain of five years of opposition and persecution had produced its effect upon the Coalition leaders and rendered them all too prone to further concessions. But the younger generation had been profoundly affected by the Croatian dictatorship and the Balkan wars; at an age when our youth think of nothing but cricket and football, the students and even the schoolboys of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia became engrossed in political speculation, brooded over the wrongs of their disunited race, and dreamt of Serbia as the new Piedmont of the Balkans. To all alike even the most advanced politician seemed no better than an old fogey, and it is no exaggeration to assert that the existing parties had lost all hold upon the overwhelming majority of those who in ten years' time will represent the manhood and the intellect of the race. The widespread nature of the movement may be illustrated by the school strike of the spring of 1912, during which every boy and girl above the age of fourteen in most of the primary and secondary schools of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia played truant as a protest against the misgovernment of Croatia. On that occasion a crowd of 5000 school children paraded the streets of Agram shouting "Down with Cuvaj" (the Ban or Governor of Croatia), and cheering the police when they tried to intervene!

As in all such movements, the views of individuals varied in intensity: some merely gave a theoretical adherence to the ideals of Mazzini or of Mill, others swallowed the Nihilist doctrine of Bakunin and dreamt of revolution, ushered in by terrorist propaganda. Out of this milieu came the two young assassins who murdered the Archduke Francis Ferdinand.

Sec.8. The Murder of the Archduke.—By a hideous irony of fate Francis Ferdinand was the one man capable of restoring order to an already desperate internal situation. His very person was a programme and a watchword, and it had long been an open secret that his accession would be the signal for drastic reforms. It was his ambition to supersede the effete Dual system by a blend of centralism and federalism such as would reconcile the national sentiment of individual races with the consciousness of a common citizenship and would at the same time restore to foreign policy the possibility of initiative. This programme involved the emancipation of the non-Magyar races of Hungary from the intolerable racial tyranny of the Magyars, and at the same time a serious attempt to solve the Southern Slav question by unifying the race under Habsburg rule. As his Imperial uncle grew older and feebler, Francis Ferdinand is known to have elaborated his designs, and a regular staff of able lieutenants had grouped themselves round him. But on the very eve of action the strong man was removed, to the scarcely veiled relief of all those elements in the State whose political and racial monopoly was threatened by such far-reaching and beneficial changes.

The circumstances of the murder are still shrouded in mystery. It is known that no proper measures were taken for the protection of the Archduke and his wife in Bosnia, though it is still impossible to assign the responsibility for such criminal negligence. It is notorious that in a country like Bosnia, which has for years been infested with police spies and informers, and where every movement of every stranger is strictly under control, so elaborate and ramified a plot could hardly hope to escape the notice of the authorities. It has even been asserted that Princip and Cabrinovic, the two assassins, were agents provocateurs in the pay of the police, and though no proof is as yet forthcoming, there is nothing inherently improbable in the idea.[1] Certain it is that the gravest suspicion rests upon those who connived at the disgraceful anti-Serb riots of which Sarajevo was the scene for nearly forty-eight hours after the murder.

[Footnote 1: The fact that they have only been sentenced to terms of imprisonment, while some of their accomplices have been condemned to death, has a much simpler explanation. Both men are under the age of twenty, and therefore by Austrian law immune from the death penalty.]

The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the country of the regicides was still regarded in the West. Yet those who seek to establish a connection between the crime of Sarajevo and the Serbian Government are on an utterly false scent. I have tried to describe the atmosphere of universal and growing discontent which produced the explosion. Those who know the Slavonic South are well aware that Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia are a seething pot which needs no stirring from the outside, and that the assassins are but the natural successors of the wild young students who during the last five years fired upon the Governors of Croatia and Bosnia.[1] But quite apart from this, the complicity of official Belgrade is rendered incredible by urgent considerations of internal Serbian politics. After a long and delicate negotiation the Concordat with the Vatican had just been concluded: the Orient railway question had reached the critical stage: above all, a customs and military union between Serbia and Montenegro was on the point of being concluded. But, of course, quite apart from such considerations, Serbia was suffering from the extreme exhaustion consequent upon waging two wars within a year, and her statesmen, despite the rebuffs administered by Count Berchtold, were genuinely anxious for a modus vivendi with the neighbouring Monarchy, as an essential condition to a period of quiet internal consolidation. But this was the very thing which the controllers of Austrian foreign policy—the phantom Minister Berchtold, the sinister clique in the Foreign Office, and the Magyar oligarchy, led by that masterful reactionary, Count Tisza, the Hungarian Premier—were anxious to avoid. They had never reconciled themselves to the new situation in the Balkans; and having twice backed the wrong horse (Turkey in the first war, Bulgaria in the second) still continued to plot against the Bucarest settlement of August 1913. Salonica still remained the secret Austrian objective, and Serbia the main obstacle to the realisation of this dream. Not for the first time, the interests of Vienna and Constantinople coincided, and the occult interests which link Budapest with Salonica played their part in the game.

[Footnote 1: June 1910, June and November 1912, June 1913.]

The crime of Sarajevo removed the chief restraining force in the councils of the Monarchy and placed the fate of Europe at the mercy of a group of gamblers in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. The military party, under Konrad von Hoetzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff (who a year ago was seriously speculating as to the collapse of Austria-Hungary), joined hands with the Magyar extremists, whose political monopoly was threatened by the advancing Slavonic tide, and with the inner ring of Prussian diplomacy, which believed the psychological moment to have arrived for measuring swords with Russia. The murder served as an admirable pretext to veil grossly aggressive tactics. It was hoped that Russia might be manoeuvred into a position where autocracy would rather abandon the Slav cause than seem to condone assassination; and it was confidently believed that Britain would hold aloof from a quarrel whose origin was so questionable. Stripped of all outward seeming, the true issues of the conflict were very different. Just as the policy of violent Turkification adopted by the Young Turks inevitably provoked the Balkan War, so the policy of Magyarisation, which has dominated Hungarian affairs for forty-five years and poisoned the relations of Austria-Hungary with her southern neighbours, has led directly to the present conflagration.

Sec.9. The Future of the Southern Slavs.—There have always been two fatal obstacles to an Austrian solution of the Southern Slav problem,—Magyar hegemony and the Dual System, to which alone that hegemony owed its survival; and it is these two worn-out and reactionary ideas (if they can be described as "ideas") that are at present fighting their death-struggle. It was the ambition of Francis Ferdinand to achieve Serbo-Croat unity within the Monarchy, and thus simultaneously to counteract the attractions of Pan-Serb propaganda and to remove the most fertile source of friction between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. His death destroyed the last chance of such a solution; for the statesmen of Vienna and Budapest were not merely incapable but openly hostile. An appeal was to be made to the arbitrament of the sword.

Long before war broke out it had become a commonplace of political theory that the Southern Slav question could be solved in one of two ways—either inside the Habsburg Monarchy or outside it—either with its help and under its aegis, or against it and despite its resistance. With the outbreak of war the problem assumed a new form; the alternatives are the absorption of the two independent Serb States in the neighbouring Monarchy—in other words, the union of the entire Southern Slav race under Habsburg rule—or the liberation of her kinsmen in the Monarchy by Serbia as the Southern Slav Piedmont. This latter ideal, it has always been obvious, could only be achieved through the medium of a general European war, and it is in this manner that it is actually in process of achievement.

The Austrian Note to Serbia was deliberately framed in such a manner as to be unacceptable by any State which valued its self-respect or prestige. The military leaders desired war, while the Foreign Office, already committed for years to a violently Serbophobe policy, was working hand in glove with the German Ambassador Tschirschky, and with the very highest quarters in Berlin. The German Government in its official case admits having given Austria "a free hand against Serbia," while there are good grounds for believing that the text of the Note was submitted to the German Emperor and that the latter fully approved of (if he did not actually suggest) the fatal time-limit of forty-eight hours, which rendered all efforts towards peace hopeless from the outset.

The Austrian case against Serbia, as embodied in this Note, rested upon a secret investigation in the prison of Sarajevo. The persistent rumours that the assassins are agents-provocateurs, and that pressure of a somewhat drastic kind was brought to bear upon them after their arrest, cannot of course be accepted as proved. But the essential point to bear in mind is the fact that the details of the Austrian "case," as embodied in the notorious Note of July 23, originated in the same quarter as the previous attempts to slander and discredit Serbia. Count Forgach, the arch-forger of the Austrian Legation in Belgrade, was permanent Under-secretary in the Foreign Office, and as Count Berchtold's right hand and prompter in Balkan affairs, was directly responsible for the pronounced anti-Serb tendencies which have dominated the foreign policy of the Dual Monarchy since the rise of the Balkan League. As a Magyar nobleman with intimate Jewish connections, Forgach was an invaluable link between Magyar extremist policy and Berlin on the one hand and Salonica and Constantinople on the other. In view of his record as the inspirer of the Vasic forgeries, we are amply justified in declining to accept any "evidence" prepared by him and his subordinates, and insisting upon a full and open trial of the murderers as the only conceivable foundation for charges of complicity.

When all is said and done, however, the murder of the Archduke, though an event of world-importance so far as the internal development and future of the Dual Monarchy is concerned, is none the less a side-issue in the Southern Slav question. This seeming paradox will not surprise those who consider the currents of national life among the Southern Slavs. The diplomatic conflict between Belgrade and Vienna or Budapest is but the outcome of a far deeper and wider movement. We are witnessing the birth-throes of a new nation, the rise of a new national consciousness, the triumph of the idea of National Unity among the three Southern Slav sisters—the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. Fate has assigned to Britain and to France an important share in the solution of the problem, and it is our duty to insist that this solution shall be radical and permanent, based upon the principle of Nationality and the wishes of the Southern Slav race. Only by treating the problem as an organic whole, by avoiding patchwork remedies and by building for a distant future, can we hope to remove one of the chief danger-centres in Europe.



BOOKS

Unfortunately some of the indispensable books are in German or French, but the following list offers a very considerable choice:—

(A) AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Austria-Hungary and Poland, by H.W. Steed, W. Alison Phillips, and D. Hannay. (Britannica War Books.) 2s. 6d. net. Uncritical reprint of very valuable articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

LOUIS LEGER. History of Austria-Hungary. 1889 (from French) (out of print).

GEOFFREY DRAGE. Austria-Hungary. 21s. net. 1909. A mine of economic facts.

H.W. STEED. The Habsburg Monarchy. 1914. (3rd ed.) 7s. 6d. net. Far the best summary of tendencies, on the lines of Bodley's France and Bryce's American Commonwealth.

R.W. SETON-WATSON (SCOTUS VIATOR). Racial Problems in Hungary. 1908. 16s. net.

R.W. SETON-WATSON. Corruption and Reform in Hungary. 1911. 4s. 6d. net.

HON.C.N. KNATCHRULL-HUGESSON. The Political Development of the Hungarian Nation. 1910. 2 vols. 14s. net. A good exposition of the extreme Magyar Chauvinist point of view.

R. MAHAFFY. The Emperor Francis Joseph. 1910. 2s. 6d. A useful character-sketch.

C.E. MAURICE. Bohemia. (Story of the Nations.) 1896. 5s. An admirable text-book.

C.E. MAURICE. The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-49. 1887. 16s. The best epitome in English.

COUNT FRANCIS LUTZOW. Bohemia. 1896. (Everyman Library.) 1s.

EMILY G. BALCH. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. New York. 1910. The best book on emigration. 10s. 6d. net.

(B) SERBIA AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

W. MILLER. The Balkans. 1896. (Story of the Nations.) The best general text-book. 5s.

W. MILLER. The Ottoman Empire, 1801-1913. 1913. (Cambridge Historical Series.) An excellent book, with a misleading title; it is really a history of the Balkan Christians, with special reference to the Greeks. Turkish history is only introduced incidentally. 7s. 6d. net.

EMILE DE LAVELEYE. The Balkan Peninsula. 1887. (Out of print,) By a distinguished Belgian professor, who was in his day recognised as an authority on Balkan questions.

LEOPOLD VON RANKE. History of Servia. 3s. 6d. (Bohn's Library.) This brilliant and sympathetic study by the greatest of German historians is of permanent value.

SIR ARTHUR J. EVANS. Through Bosnia on Foot. 1877. (Out of print.) The distinguished archaeologist took part, as a young man, in the Bosnian rising against the Turks.

R.W. SETON-WATSON. The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy. 1911. 12s. 0d. net. (Greatly modified and extended in a German edition published in 1913.)

R.W. SETON-WATSON. Absolutism in Croatia. 1912. 2s. net.

CEDO MIJATOVIC. Servia of the Servians. 1911. 16s. net.

ELODIE MIJATOVIC. Serbian Folklore.. 1874.

(C) THREE OTHER BOOKS DEALING WITH THE BALKANS ARE STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

SIR CHARLES ELIOT (ODYSSEUS). Turkey in Europe. 2nd ed. 7s. 6d. net.

H.N. BRAILSFORD. Macedonia. 1906. 12s. 6d. net.

LUIGI VILLARI AND OTHERS. The Balkan Question. 1905. 10s. 6d. net.



CHAPTER V

RUSSIA

"God will save Russia as He has saved her many times. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and their meekness. Fathers and teachers, watch over the people's faith, and this will not be a dream. I have been amazed all my life in our great people by their dignity, their true and seemly dignity. I have seen it myself, I can testify to it; I have seen it and marvelled at it; I have seen it in spite of the degraded sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not servile; and, even after two centuries of serfdom, they are free in manner and bearing,—yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious. 'You are rich and noble, you are clever and talented, well be so, God bless you. I respect you, but I know that I too am a man. By the very fact that I respect you without envy I prove my dignity as a man....'

"God will save His people, for Russia is great in her humility. I dream of seeing, and seem to see clearly already, our future. It will come to pass that even the most corrupt of our rich will end by being ashamed of his riches before the poor; and the poor, seeing his humility, will understand and give way before him, will respond joyfully and kindly to his honourable shame. Believe me that it will end in that; things are moving to that. Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us. If we were brothers, there would be fraternity; but before that they will never agree about the division of wealth. We preserve the image of Christ, and it will shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world. So be it, so be it!"—DOSTOIEFFSKY, The Brothers Karamazov.

"The French are a decent civilised lot of people; but I wish we were not allies of Russia." This, or something very like it, is the spoken or unspoken thought of a very large number of persons, especially among the working-classes in England at the present time. English suspicion of Russia is no new thing, though there is no doubt that the suppression of the revolution during the years 1906-1909 made it more general than ever before. It was responsible, for example, for the Crimean War, and the "crafty Russian" has become a catch-word almost as widely accepted in England as the phrase "perfidious Albion" is upon the Continent. I have seen Russia at her worst: I saw the revolution stamped out cruelly and relentlessly; I have lived three years in Finland, and know the weariness of spirit and aching bitterness of heart that comes to a fine and cultured race in its perpetual struggle for liberty against an alien Government to whom the word liberty means nothing but rebellion. And yet I am firmly persuaded of the innate soundness of the Russian people, and of the tremendous future which lies before it in the history of the world. I believe too that the English are suspicious of Russia, not because Russia is crafty or evil or barbaric, but because English people find it very difficult to understand a race which is so extraordinarily different from themselves. We fear the unknown; we suspect what is unlike ourselves; yet we shall do well, in the present crisis, whether we are thinking of our enemy Germany or our ally Russia, to remember the axiom laid down by Edmund Burke, the greatest of English political thinkers: "It is impossible to bring an indictment against a whole nation."

In any case, for good or ill, Russia is our ally, and if Germany is beaten, Russia seems likely to play as great a part in the settlement as she did in 1815. It therefore behoves us, in our own self-interest if for no higher motive, to try and understand the spirit and ideals of a great people, who, as they did a century ago at the time of Napoleon, are once again coming forward to assist Europe in ridding herself of a military despotism.

Sec.1. The Russian State.—Many of us do not realise the most obvious facts about Russia. For example, our atlases, which give us Europe on one page and Asia on another, prevent us from grasping the most elementary fact of all—her vastness. Mr. Kipling has told us that "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." But Russia confounds both Mr. Kipling and the map-makers by stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific. For her there is not Europe and Asia but one continent, and she is the whole inside of it. All Europe between the four inland seas, and all Asia north of lat. 50 deg. (and a good deal south of it too)—that is Russia, a total area of 8-1/4 million square miles! This enormous country, which comprises one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe, is at present thinly populated; it has roughly 20 persons to the square mile as against 618 to the square mile in England and Wales. Yet for all that it contains the largest white population of any single state on earth, numbering in all 171 million souls. Moreover, this population is increasing rapidly; it has quadrupled itself during the last century, and with the advent of industrialism the increase is likely to be still more rapid. Many among us alive to-day may see Russia's population reach and perhaps pass that of teeming China. As yet, however, industrialism is only at its beginning in Russia; more than 85 per cent of the inhabitants live in the country, as tillers of the soil.

It will be at once evident that this fact gives her an immense advantage over industrial nations in time of war. She has, on the one hand, an almost inexhaustible supply of men to draw upon, while, on the other hand, her simple economic structure is hardly at all affected. A great European war may mean for a Western country dislocation of trade, hundreds of mills and pits standing idle, vast masses of unemployed, leading to distress, poverty and in the end starvation; for Russia it means little more than that the peasants grow fat on the corn and food-stuffs which in normal times they would have exported to the West. Furthermore, her geographical and economic circumstances render Russia ultimately invincible from the military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812. She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy. Russia has much to gain from a great European war and hardly anything to lose.

At first sight, therefore, there seems to be a great deal in favour of the theory, somewhat widely held at the moment, that to crush Germany and Austria will be to lay Europe at the feet of Russia, and that when Germany has been driven out of France and Belgium, the Allies in the West might have to patch up a peace with her in order to drive the Russians out of Germany. Behind this theory lies the assumption that Russia is an aggressive military state, inspired by the same ideals as have led Germany to deluge the world with blood. This is an assumption which is, I believe, absolutely unwarranted by anything in the history or character of the nation.

Historically speaking, the Russian Empire is an extension of the old Roman Empire; it is the direct heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, as the mediaeval "Holy Roman Empire," founded by Charlemagne in A.D. 800, was the heir of the Western Roman Empire, which had its capital at Rome itself. But the Eastern Empire survived its Western twin by a thousand years; the Goths deposed the last Roman emperor in 476, the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. The Russian Empire, therefore, which did not begin its political development until after the fall of Constantinople, entered the field some six and a half centuries later than the mediaeval empire of Charlemagne, which was indeed already falling to pieces in the end of the fifteenth century. Thus Russia presents the strange spectacle of a mediaeval State existing in the twentieth century, and she is still in some particulars what Western Europe was in the Middle Ages. She has, however, attained a unity, a strength and a centralisation which the Holy Roman Empire never succeeded in acquiring. There is nothing corresponding to the feudal system, with all the disruptive tendencies which that system carried with it, in modern Russia; partly owing to the constant danger of Mongolian invasion which threatened Russia for so many centuries, partly as a result of Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the boyars, who were analogous to the mediaeval barons, and of Peter the Great's substitution of a nobility of service for that of rank, Russia is politically more centralised than any mediaeval, and socially more democratic than any modern, country. Russia has also solved that other great problem which perpetually agitated the mediaeval world—the conflict between the secular and the spiritual power. She is the most religious nation in the world, but she has no Papacy; Peter the Great subordinated the Church to the State by placing the Holy Synod, which controls the former, under the authority of a layman, a minister appointed by the Tsar. Yet, while she appears united and centralised when we think of her nebulous prototype, the Holy Roman Empire, we have only to compare her with her Western neighbours, and especially with that triumph of State-organisation, Germany, to see how amorphous, how inefficient, how loose, how mediaeval is the structure of this enormous State.

Peter the Great, who was more than any other man the creator of modern Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-mass together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandisement of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic principles. As Mr. Maurice Baring puts it, "Peter the Great introduced the democratic idea that service was everything, rank nothing. He had it proclaimed to the whole gentry that any gentleman, in any circumstances whatsoever and to whatever family he belonged, should salute and yield place to any officer. The gentleman served as a private soldier and became an officer, but a private soldier who did not belong to the nobility, and who attained the rank of a commissioned officer, became, ipso facto, a member of the hereditary nobility.... In the civil service he introduced the same democratic system. He divided it into three sections: military, civil, and court. Every section was divided into fourteen ranks, or Chins; the attainment of the eighth class conferred the privilege of hereditary nobility, even though those who received it might have been of the humblest origin. He hereby replaced the aristocratic hierarchy of pedigree by a democratic hierachy of service. Promotion was made solely according to service; lineage counted for nothing. There was no social difference, however wide, which could not be levelled by means of State service." This is partly what was meant when it was stated in the last paragraph that Russia was socially the most democratic of modern countries. The system established by Peter the Great exists to-day. Russia is governed, not by a feudal nobility like that which ground the faces of the poor in France before the revolution of 1789, nor by a number of capitalists who live by exploiting the workers; for neither feudal nobility nor capitalism (as yet) has any real power in Russia. She is governed by a civil service, and by a civil service more democratic than our own, where the higher posts are as a rule only open to members of the upper and middle classes, less exclusive than that of India, where the higher officials are nearly all recruited from the members of an alien race—a civil service, in short, whose only close parallel is the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine the Roman Church as a secular institution, with a monarch at its head ruling by hereditary right instead of an elected president like the Pope, and you get a very fair idea of the Russian Government machine. All that we associate with the word aristocracy in the West, the hereditary principle, primo-geniture, the accumulation of the land and capital of the country in the hands of a small class, the spirit of caste, the traditions of nobility handed down with the title-deeds from father to son, are either non-existent or of comparative unimportance in Russian society.

There is also none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature of the life in "democratic" England and to which we have given the name "snobbery." There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are broadly marked and there is no sense of competition between them. A peasant is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a nobleman he meets him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior position in the social scale. A twin-brother of English "snobbery" is English "hypocrisy." This, as has been well said, is a kind of "social cement," for it is a tribute to a standard of social conduct set up by the dominant class in a nation. And since there exists no dominant class in Russia, but only a dominant hierarchy drawn from all classes, hypocrisy is absent from the Russian character. Mr. Stephen Graham, who was, I believe, at one time a clerk in a London office, found our civilisation so intolerable that one day he flung it off and escaped to Russia, where he has lived as a peasant tramp for many years. To revolutionaries who met him and expressed their astonishment that an Englishman should choose Russia of all places to live in, he replied, "I came to Russia because it is the only free country left in the world." There is, in truth, much to be said for this startling remark. In no country on earth is there such unaffected good-will, such open hospitality, such an instinctive respect for personal liberty—liberty of thought and of manners—such tolerance for the frailties of human nature, such an abundance of what the great Russian novelist Dostoieffsky called "all-humanness" and St. Paul called "charity," as in Russia. All this, of course, did not come about as a result of the bureaucratic system; it springs like that system itself from the fundamentally democratic spirit of the Russian people.

Sec.2. Religion.—The last paragraph will read strangely to those people whose only ideas about Russia are gleaned from newspaper accounts of the revolution of 1905. We shall come back to the revolution and its significance later; but meanwhile we must notice another very striking fact about Russian life—its all-pervading religious atmosphere. Russia is a land of peasants. In England and Wales 78 per cent of the population live in towns and the remaining 22 per cent in the country; in Russia something like 87 per cent live in the country as against 13 per cent in the towns. These figures are enough to show where the real centre of gravity of the Russian nation lies. The peasant, or moujik, is a primitive and generally an entirely illiterate person, but he possesses qualities which his more sophisticated brothers in the West may well envy and admire, a profound common-sense, a grand simplicity of life and outlook, and an unshakable faith in the unseen world.

The interior of Russia is almost wholly unknown in the West; until a few years back it was as much of a terra incognita as Central Africa. But the revolution led English writers and journalists to explore it, and when the dust and smoke of that upheaval, which had obscured the truth from the eyes of Europe, passed away, an astonished world perceived the real Russia for the first time. "Russia," writes Mr. Stephen Graham, who has done more than any other man to bring the truth home to us, "is not a land of bomb-throwers, is not a land of intolerable tyranny and unhappiness, of a languishing and decayed peasantry, of a corrupt and ugly church; the Russians are an agricultural nation, bred to the soil, illiterate as the savages, and having as yet no ambition to live in the towns; they are as strong as giants, simple as children, mystically superstitious by reason of their unexplained mystery." Russia is in fact 145 million peasants—ploughing and praying. And here once again one is reminded of the Middle Ages. Cross the Russian frontier and you enter the mediaeval world. Miracles are believed in, holy men are revered as saints, thousands of pilgrims journey on foot every year to Jerusalem, which is to every true believer the centre of the universe and therefore becomes at Easter almost a Russian city. Russia is the most Christian country in the world, and her people are the most Christ-like. The turbulence and violence, so contrary to the Christian spirit, which was an inseparable feature of mediaeval feudalism is absent from Russia; and the gospel of non-resistance, of brotherly love, of patience under affliction, of pity and mercy, which Tolstoi preached so eloquently to the world at large, he learnt from two teachers—the peasant of modern Russia and the Peasant of ancient Palestine, who was crucified upon the Cross.

Yet it is a mistake to talk, as some do, of the power of the Russian Church, or of "priestcraft." The Church has little political power or social prestige. It is the power of religion, not that of ecclesiastical institutions, which is the arresting fact about modern Russia. It is not so much that Russia has a church, as that she is a church. In England we have narrowed religion down to one day of the week and shut it up in special buildings which we call churches; in Russia it is impossible to avoid religion. As you pass out of the gangway of the ticket-office at the railway station, you find yourself in front of a sacred picture with a lamp burning continually before it, and you are expected to utter a prayer before beginning your journey. Every room in Russia has its eikon—is in fact a chapel, every enterprise is sanctified by prayer and ceremony. All English travellers in Russia have acknowledged this profound national sense of religion, and contrasted it with the religious formalism of the West. "Italy," wrote Mr. H.G. Wells, on his recent visit to Russia, "abounds in noble churches because the Italians are artists and architects, and a church is an essential part of the old English social system, but Moscow glitters with two thousand crosses because the people are organically Christian. I feel in Russia that for the first time in my life I am in a country where Christianity is alive. The people I saw crossing themselves whenever they passed a church, the bearded men who kissed the relics in the Church of the Assumption, the unkempt grave-eyed pilgrim, with his ragged bundle on his back and his little tea-kettle slung in front of him, who was standing quite still beside a pillar in the same church, have no parallels in England." Mr. Rothay Reynolds, in his interesting and sympathetic book My Russian Year, writes in much the same strain: "In Russia God and His Mother, saints and angels, seem near; men rejoice or stand ashamed beneath their gaze. The people of the land have made it a vast sanctuary, perfumed with prayer and filled with the memories of heroes of the faith. Saints and sinners, believers and infidels, are affected by its atmosphere; and so it has come about that Russia is the land of lofty ideals." And Mr. Stephen Graham, again, in his Undiscovered Russia, speaks with glowing admiration of the Russian Church. "The Holy Church," he says, "is wonderful. It is the only fervid living church in Europe. It lives by virtue of the people who compose it. If the priests were wood, it would still be great. The worshippers are always there with one accord. There are always strangers in the churches, always pilgrims. God is the Word that writes all men brothers in Russia and all women sisters. The fact behind that word is the fountain of hospitality and friendship."

The religious aspect of Russian life has been dwelt upon at some length, because it is the key to everything in Russia and has a direct bearing upon the present war. "Religion in Russia," writes Mr. Maurice Baring, "is a part of patriotism. The Russian considers that a man who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. He divides humanity, roughly, into two categories—the Orthodox and the heathen—just as the Greeks divided humanity into Greeks and Barbarians. Not only is the Church of Russia a national church, owing to the large part which the State, the Emperor, and the civil authority play in it, but in Russia religion itself becomes a question of nationality, nationalism, and patriotism." Russian Christianity, like Russian Tsardom, is derived from the old Roman empire of Constantinople. The Russian Church is a branch, and far the most important branch, of the Greek Orthodox Church, which drifted apart from the Catholic Church, which had its centre at Rome, and finally separated from it in the eleventh century. As the greatest Orthodox Christian power in the world, Russia naturally regards herself as the rightful protector of all Orthodox Christians. Her mortal enemy, with whom so long as he remains in Europe any lasting peace is impossible, is the Turk; and her eyes are ever directed towards Constantinople, as the ancient capital of her faith. The spirit of the Crusades is far from dead in the Russian people; the Crimean War, for example, was fought in that spirit.

It will be at once apparent that Russia takes and must continue to take a profound interest in the Christian peoples of the Balkans. Greeks, Roumanians, Servians, Bulgarians and Montenegrins all belong to the Orthodox Church; all have been engaged throughout the nineteenth century in a struggle for existence against the common foe, Islam. Moreover, all except the two first-mentioned peoples are allied to Russia by ties of race as well as by religion, since they are members of the Slavonic stock. To the average Russian, therefore, the bulk of the Balkan peninsula is as much Russia Irredenta, as the north-east coast of the Adriatic is Italia Irredenta to the average Italian; and as a matter of fact there is a good deal more to be said for Russia's case than for Italy's. There is, however, another great power which possesses interests in the Balkans and which is viewed by Russia with a suspicion and dislike hardly inferior to that entertained towards Turkey—I mean the empire of Austria-Hungary. A Catholic state, controlled by Germans and Magyars, Austria-Hungary contains in its southern portion a population of over seven million Slavs, some three millions of whom are of the Orthodox faith. The Dual Monarchy has constantly outraged national and religious feeling in Russia by her treatment of this Slavonic population, and her annexation in 1908 of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both of them Slavonic countries, was regarded as an open challenge to Russia.

It is not therefore surprising that the Tsar has intervened in the present crisis. Had it refused to come to the assistance of Servia when Austria attacked her, the Russian Government would have been unable to face public opinion. Even those who know Russia best are amazed at the complete unanimity of the country in the matter of this war; and proof that it is not merely a war of aggression inspired by Pan-Slavist sentiment may be found in the fact that all political parties, revolutionaries, constitutionalists and reactionaries, have enthusiastically approved it. How far Germany misunderstood (or affected to misunderstand) the real state of feeling in Russia may be seen in the despatch of July 26 by the British Ambassador in Vienna, who, in talking the crisis over with the German Ambassador and asking "whether the Russian Government might not be compelled by public opinion to intervene on behalf of a kindred nationality," was told that "everything depended on the personality of the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, who could resist easily, if he chose, the pressure of a few newspapers." England drew her sword in this struggle on behalf of Belgium and in the name of civilisation and treaty rights; Russia has done the same on behalf of Serbia and in the name of common blood and a common altar. I, for one, firmly believe that her hands are as clean as ours.

Sec.3. The Revolutionary Movement and its Significance.—It is now time to say something of the revolutionary movement of 1905 and of its ruthless suppression which gave Russia so evil a reputation in the eyes of Western Europe. It was my good fortune to be a resident in the dominions of the Tsar during the critical years of 1906-9, to be present at a session of the first Duma and to mingle with the members of that historic assembly in the lobby of the Parliament House, to catch something of the extraordinary belief in the coming of the millennium which was prevalent among all classes in Petrograd in the first charmed months of 1906, and finally to have been acquainted with active revolutionaries and their friends throughout the whole of my period of residence. I can therefore speak with a certain amount of inner knowledge of the revolution; and though I do not wish to claim any particular authority for the opinions stated below, which are after all nothing but the opinions of a single individual who has lived for three years in a corner of the Russian Empire, yet they have at least this advantage over those entertained on the subject by the average Englishmen, viz. that they are based not on newspaper reports but on actual experience, and that they were arrived at gradually and—it may be added—with considerable reluctance, since they had, as it were, to win their way through a number of my own personal sympathies and political prejudices. There is, of course, no room here for any detailed treatment of a movement upon which a big book might be written, and I shall therefore have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian revolution.

The main reason why English people get mistaken ideas about Russia is that they imagine Russians to be nothing but Englishmen picturesquely disguised in furs and top-boots, and because they interpret the political situation in Russia in terms of English history and politics. As I have already tried to show, Russians are built differently from English people, from the soul outwards, while the political and social condition of the Russian Empire is totally unlike anything that has ever existed in this country. If therefore the real causes of the movement of 1905 and of its failure are to be rightly understood, we must put away from our minds the desire to find analogies in the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, or the French Revolution of 1789, or the social revolution of which Karl Marx dreamed; Russia can only be interpreted in terms of Russian history and Russian conditions. In one thing, however, the Russian revolution was like all revolutions which have ever been or are ever likely to be, viz. that it was concerned with two distinct issues, one a narrow question of political and constitutional reform, and the other a far wider question involving an attempt to reconstruct not merely the institutions of society but also to transform the ideals and conceptions upon which society rested.

Let us first of all consider the narrower political issue. This was simple enough; the outbreak of 1905 had as its primary object the setting up of some form of representative government which would control the bureaucratic machine. It has been already pointed out that the constitution of modern Russia was largely due to the genius of Peter the Great. During the nineteenth century, however, it became apparent to thinking Russians that the constitution, for the sake both of stability and efficiency, needed development in the direction of popular representation. The plea of efficiency was really far the stronger of the two. Had Peter the Great been eternal, he might possibly have continued to exercise an effective control over the administrative system which he created; for he was a man of superhuman energy and will-power. But most Tsars, who are men of ordinary capacity, found it impossible to do so. The consequence was that the bureaucracy acquired what amounted in practice to absolute irresponsibility. Now irresponsibility is demoralising to any administration, however democratic be the principles upon which its officials are selected. A bureaucracy, ruling without proper external control, becomes a prey to the demons of red tape, routine, officialdom and place-hunting; it tends to stifle individual initiative and the sense of moral responsibility, since it forgets the real object of its existence—the good government of the country—in its passion for self-preservation and its desire to secure the smooth-working of the machine; it becomes inhuman, intensely conservative and corrupt. Above all it develops a hyper-sensitiveness to lay criticism, which compels it to do all in its power—and in Russia that power is unlimited—to crush freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The problem, however, of devising some popular check upon its action was an extremely difficult one for the simple reason that the mass of the Russian people never have taken, and even to-day do not take, any interest in political questions. Nevertheless the Tsar, Alexander II., who was one of the most enlightened monarchs that ever sat upon the Russian throne, determined to attempt a solution. Unfortunately on March 1, 1881, the very day when Alexander had given his approval to a scheme of constitutional reform, involving the establishment of representative institutions, he was assassinated by revolutionaries. This fatal act put back the clock for twenty-five years, the court and the nation were thrown into the arms of the bureaucracy as their only protector against terrorism, and reaction reigned supreme. Meanwhile the bureaucracy grew more corrupt, more tyrannical, more inefficient every day, while on the other hand the party of reform, thrust as it were underground and hunted like rats, became more and more bitter in spirit and more and more extreme in theory.

It is important to bear in mind that the struggle has never from beginning to end been one which divided the nation as a whole into two hostile camps. Public opinion, when it has not been indifferent, has swayed now to one side and now to the other, according as it was stirred by some flagrant act of oppression on the part of the bureaucracy or some outrageous act of terrorism on the part of the revolutionaries. The truth is that the civil war in Russia—for it was nothing less—was confined to quite a narrow section of society. It has been said that there are practically speaking no class distinctions in the English sense of the word, in Russia; there is, however, a very real distinction between the intelligentsia and the peasants. The intelligentsia are the few million educated Russians who control, or seek to control, the destinies of the 145 million uneducated tillers of the soil. There is nothing quite like them in this country, though the expression "the professional class" describes them in part. Broadly speaking, they are people who have passed through school and university, and can therefore lay claim to a certain amount of culture; their birth is a matter of no moment, they may be the children of peasants or of noblemen. It is from this "class," if we can call it so, that both the bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement draw their recruits. The real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people. Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet passed out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for the most part translations from foreign authors. The result is that the political and social ideas of the intelligentsia are almost wholly derived from countries whose structure is totally different from their own. We shall presently see that this fact had an important bearing on the development of the outbreak of 1905. It is sufficient here to notice that the struggle was one between two sections of the intelligentsia, political idealism against political stagnation, the Red Flag versus Red Tape.

After twenty years of bureaucratic government the country as a whole began to grow once again restless. In this period a proletariate had come into being. It was a mere drop in the bucket of 145 millions of peasants, but its voice was heard in the towns, and it was steeped in the Marxian doctrines of Social Democracy. Moreover the peasants themselves had their grievances. They cared nothing and understood less of the political theories which the revolutionaries assiduously preached among them, but they pricked up their ears when the agitators began to talk about land and taxation. Up to 1861 the peasants had been serfs, the property, with the land on which they lived, of the landowner. At their emancipation it was necessary to provide them with land of their own; the State, therefore, bought what was considered sufficient for the purpose from the landowners, handed it over to the peasants, and recouped itself by imposing a land-tax on the peasants to expire after a period of forty-nine years. This tax was felt to be exceedingly onerous, and in addition to this by the beginning of the twentieth century it became clear that the land acquired in 1861 was not nearly enough to support a growing population. These factors, together with the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, which revealed an appalling state of corruption and incompetency in the government of the country, furnished the revolutionaries with an opportunity which was not to be missed. A rapid series of military and naval mutinies, agrarian disorders, assassinations of obnoxious officials, socialist risings in the towns, during the year 1905, culminating in the universal strike of October, brought the Government to its knees, and on the 17th of the same month the Tsar issued his manifesto granting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and a representative assembly. The revolution had, apparently, won on the constitutional issue.

Yet what looked like the end of bureaucratic absolutism proved to be the destruction of the revolutionary party. Had the reformers of 1905 concentrated their energies upon the task of turning the new legislature into an adequate check upon the bureaucratic system, there is little doubt they would have succeeded. As it was their success in this direction was only partial. It is true that a Duma still sits at the Taurida Palace at Petrograd, but it is elected on a narrow property franchise, and its relations with the bureaucracy are as yet not properly defined; it criticises but it possesses no real control. This failure of the revolution was almost wholly due to the revolutionaries themselves, who, instead of confining their attacks to the Government machine, sought to undermine the entire structure of society and to overthrow the moral and religious ideals of the nation. Moreover, their attitude was entirely negative, and they possessed little or no constructive ability of any kind. Even the first Duma, which contained the ablest politicians among the reformers, did not succeed in passing acts of parliament, affirming the most elementary principles of civil liberty; and it damaged itself irreparably in the eyes of the country by refusing to condemn "terrorism" while demanding an amnesty for all political offenders. The unique opportunity which the first Duma afforded was frittered away in futile bickerings and wordy attacks upon the Government.

Meanwhile, though a temporary truce was observed during the Duma's sessions, its dissolution on July 21, 1906, two and a half months after opening, was the signal for a fresh outburst of outrages on both sides. The country was fast drifting into anarchy; agrarian risings, indiscriminate bomb-throwing, pogroms, highway robberies carried out in the name of the "social revolution" and euphemistically entitled expropriation, outbreaks of a horrible kind of blood-lust which delighted in motiveless murder for the sake of murder, were the order of the day. The revolution was strong enough neither to crush the reactionaries nor to control the revolutionaries themselves. The foundations of the social structure seemed to be dissolving in a welter of blood and crime, and public opinion, which in its hatred of bureaucracy had hitherto sided with the revolution, suddenly drew back in horror from the abyss which opened out in front of it. Stolypin, the Strafford of modern Russia, who condemned the extremists of both sides, was called to the helm of the State; his watchword, "Order first, reform afterwards," was backed by the force of public opinion; and, as he stamped out the revolution with a heel of iron, the country shuddered but approved. The peasants were pacified by the remission of the hated tax, and by measures for providing them with more land; and Russia sank once more into her normal condition.

But political incompetency is not a reason sufficiently weighty in itself to account for the remarkable revulsion of public feeling against the revolutionary party. Behind the narrow political issue lay the larger philosophical and moral one; and it was the discovery by the country of the real character and ultimate aims of the party which for a few months in 1906 seized the reins of power that will alone provide a sufficient explanation of one of the most astonishing political debacles of modern history. The revolution was nothing less than an attempt by a small minority of theorists and moral anarchists to force Western civilisation upon Russia, and not Western civilisation as it actually is but a sort of abstract "Westernism" derived from books. For the revolutionaries were far more Western than the Westerns. They had not merely swallowed wholesale the latest and most extreme political and social fads, picked up from the literature of England, France, and Germany, but they possessed a courage of their convictions and a will to carry them out to the logical conclusion which many "advanced thinkers" of the West lack. They were not modernists or new theologians but atheists, not Fabians or social reformers but revolutionary socialists armed with bombs, not radicals but republicans, not divorce-law-reformers but "free lovers." A remarkable book was published in 1910 called Landmarks. It was written by a number of disillusioned revolutionaries, and gives a vivid picture of the effect which the foregoing principles had upon the lives of those who upheld them. Here is one extract:

"In general, the whole manner of life of the intelligentsia was terrible; a long abomination of desolation, without any kind or sort of discipline, without the slightest consecutiveness, even on the surface. The day passes in doing nobody knows what, to-day in one manner, and to-morrow, as a result of a sudden inspiration, entirely contrariwise—everyone lives his life in idleness, slovenliness, and a measureless disorder—chaos and squalor reign in his matrimonial and sexual relations—a naive absence of conscientiousness distinguishes his work; in public affairs he shows an irrepressible inclination towards despotism, and an utter absence of consideration towards his fellow-creatures; and his attitude towards the authorities of the State is marked at times by a proud defiance, and at others (individually and not collectively) by compliance."

As a set-off to this picture of moral chaos, it should be remembered that these people when called upon to die for their revolutionary faith did so with the greatest heroism. Nor is the picture true of all revolutionaries; some of the noblest men it has ever been my good fortune to meet were Russian revolutionaries. But these were the product of an earlier and sterner school, the puritanical "Nihilism" of the 'eighties; and it is impossible to deny the substantial truth of the above description as far as the rank and file of the modern revolutionary school are concerned.[1] Such people were divided by a whole universe from the peasants to whom they offered themselves as leaders and saviours; and the schemes of regeneration which they preached were not merely useless, because purely negative, but were exotic plants which could never flourish on Russian soil. Thus the revolution triumphed for about twelve months as a purely destructive force, but when the necessity for construction arose its adherents found that they were entirely ignorant of the elements of the problem before them. This problem was the peasant, and the revolutionaries, though they had worshipped the People (with a capital P) for years and had done their best to convert them, had never made any attempt to understand them. And when the peasant discovered what the revolutionary was like, he loathed and detested him. "They hate us," a writer in Landmarks confesses, "because they fail to recognise that we are men. We are, in their eyes, monsters in human shape, men without God in their soul; and they are right."

[Footnote 1: It is confirmed by all impartial observers, see e.g. Professor Pares' Russia and Reform, chap. ix., entitled "Lives of the Intelligents."]

There is a characteristic story told by Mr. Maurice Baring about a certain revolutionary who one day arrived at a village to convert the inhabitants to socialism. "He thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policeman. So he took a holy picture and said, 'There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this eikon and break it in pieces, and if there is a God He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.' Then he took the eikon and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants, 'You see, God has not killed me.' 'No,' said the peasants, 'God has not killed you, but we will'; and they killed him."

This story, whether true or not, is a parable, in which one may read the whole meaning of the failure of the Russian revolution. It shows how an attack upon what they hold sacred may rouse to acts of fury a people who are admitted by all who know them to be the most tolerant, most tender-hearted, and most humane in Europe. The notion that Russia is a humane country may sound strange in English ears. Yet capital punishment, which is still part of our legal system, was abolished in Russia as long ago as 1753, except for cases of high treason. From 1855 to 1876 only one man was executed in the whole of that vast empire; and from 1876 to 1903 only 114. On the other hand between the years 1905 and 1908 the total of executions reached the appalling figure of 3629. This is but to translate into criminal statistics the story just quoted; for the years 1905-8 were the years when martial law reigned in Russia, the years of revolution. The Tsar, it is true, wore the black cap, and the hangman's rope was manipulated by the bureaucracy, but the jury who brought in the verdict was a jury of 145 million peasants.

Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which is still so greatly misunderstood in England. It was not the uprising of an oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive. All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the pogrom, and Siberia for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying, the "Marseillaise" on their lips, with the fortitude of Christian martyrs. But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress, which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each other's language; it is a renewal of the Titanic contest, which was decided in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between the mediaeval and the modern world. To the modern mind no period is so difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is another word for process, of success which implies perpetual change, in either case of "getting on" somewhere, somehow, we know not where or how; our very universe, from which we have carefully excluded the supernatural, has become a development machine, a huge spinning-mill, and our religion, if we have one, a matter of "progressive revelation." We look before and after, forwards to some dim utopia, backwards to some ape-like ancestor who links us with the animal world. Our outlook is horizontal, the mediaeval outlook perpendicular. The mediaeval man looked upward and downward, to heaven and hell, when he thought of the future, to sun and cloud, land and crops, when he thought of the present. He lived in the presence of perpetual miracle, the daily miracle of sunrise, sunset, and shower; and in the constant faith in resurrection, whether of the corn which he sowed in the furrow or of his body which his friends would reverently sow in that deeper furrow, the grave. And his life was as simple and static as his universe; the seasons determined his labours, the Church his holidays. Books did not disturb his faith in the unseen world, for he was illiterate; nor the lust of gold his contentment with his existence, for commerce was still confined to a few towns. Russia to-day is in spirit what Europe was in the Middle Ages.[1] The revolutionaries offered her Western civilisation and Western philosophy, and she rejected the gift with horror.

[Footnote 1: This, of course, by no means implies that she is behind the West, or that she is of necessity bound to pass through the same process of development. The problem of modern Russia is not to imitate the West but to discover some way of coming to terms with Western ideals without surrendering her own.]

Will she continue to maintain this attitude? "The Russian peasant," says Mr. Maurice Baring, "as long as he tills the ground will never abandon his religion or the observance of it.... Because the religion of the peasant is the working hypothesis taught him by life; and by his observance of it he follows what he conceives to be the dictates of common sense consecrated by immemorial custom." The crucial point of this passage is the conditional clause: "as long as he tills the ground." Of course, Russia, the granary of Europe, must always be predominantly an agricultural country; yet she is at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by intelligentsia. Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up Russia will become, according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of The Russian Year-Book, "without a doubt the richest Empire the world has ever seen." Attracted by her vast mining possibilities, by her enormous virgin forests, by her practically unlimited capacity for grain-production, the capital of Europe is knocking at the doors of Russia. Factories are rising, mines being started all over the country. Russia is about to be exploited by European business enterprise, just as America and Africa have been. The world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people as potential cheap labour. Thus within the last few years something analogous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into existence in Russia. We may catch a glimpse of what these new classes are like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called Changing Russia. He writes:

"The Russian bourgeois is of this sort; he wants to know the price of everything. Of things which are independent of price he knows nothing, or, if he knows of them, he sneers at them and hates them. Talk to him of religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of woman, and show that you understand anything about her unsexually; talk to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for money—and the bourgeois is uneasy.... Instead of opera, the gramophone; instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature, the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of modern English life.... It may be thought that there is little harm in the commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not so bad as not to be on the way to something better. But that would be a mistake; if once the Russian nation becomes thoroughly perverted, it will be the most treacherous, most vile, most dangerous in Europe. For the perverted Russian all is possible; it is indeed his favourite maxim, borrowed, he thinks, from Nietzsche, that 'all is permitted,' and by 'all' he means all abomination, all fearful and unheard-of bestiality, all cruelty, all falsity, all debauch.... Selfish as it is possible to be, crass, heavy, ugly, unfaithful in marriage, unclean, impure, incapable apparently of understanding the good and the true in their neighbours and in life—such is the Russian bourgeois."

Mr. Graham's picture of the new proletariat in the Ural mines is an equally horrible one:

"Gold mining is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man are made viler. If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauchery.... The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand pounds, it is rather difficult to know how to spend it. His ideal of happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him lies in that.... Mias is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone. It is situated in a most lovely hollow among the hills, and, seen from the distance, it is one of the most beautiful villages of North Russia; but seen from within, it is a veritable inferno."

Mr. Graham writes as a poet rather than as an economist or a sociologist, but there is no doubt a grave danger to Russia in a sudden adoption of industrial life.

Intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariate are all products of the same forces, all belong to the same family; they are westernised Russians; they have passed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century at one stride, and the violent transition has cut them completely adrift from tradition and from all moral and religious standards; books, commerce, and industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilisation, have not civilised such Russians, they have de-civilised them. But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fraction of the nation; and there are happily signs that the dangers of an exotic culture are being realised even by the intelligentsia themselves. Since the failure of the revolution there has been a remarkable revival of interest among Russian thinkers in the native institutions, habits, and even the religion of the country; and it may be that in time there will emerge from this chaos of ideals a culture and a civilisation which will "make the best of both worlds" by adopting Western methods without surrendering an inch of the nation's spiritual territory, above which floats the standard of religion, simplicity, and brotherly love. The present war, terrible as it is, may do something towards bringing this about, for the Russian people, faced by a common danger and united in a common purpose, are now of one mind and one heart, in a way that they have not been since a century ago Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Moscow.

And let this be said: if Russia should ever cease to be Russia, if she ever loses those grand national characteristics which make her so different from the West, and therefore so difficult for us Westerns to understand, the world as a whole will be infinitely the poorer for that loss. We need Russia even more than Russia needs us; for, while we have grasped the trappings, she possesses the real spirit of democracy. Of the three democratic ideals, proclaimed by France in 1789, the mystical trinity: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, how much has yet been realised by the peoples of the West? And Russia is in the way of realising them all! Fraternity and equality are, as we have seen, the distinctive features of her national spirit and social structure, and, if her liberty is as yet imperfect on the political side, it is far more complete than ours on the side of moral tolerance and respect for the sanctity of human personality. After all, the reason why Russia has not got complete political freedom is because, as a nation, she has hitherto taken no interest in politics; for the first time in 1905 she discovered the use of political action, and she got out of it a solution of the agrarian distress and a representative assembly; when she wants more liberty in this direction, she will have no difficulty in securing it.

Sec.4. The Subject Nationalities.—It may fairly be objected at this point that while Russia may possess these excellent qualities, she has consistently refused to allow liberty to other peoples, to the Jews, for example, the Poles, and the Finns. It is necessary therefore to say something on the matter of Russia's subject nationalities before bringing these remarks to a conclusion.

Out of the six or seven million Jews in the world, over five million live within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russia is therefore the motherland of the Children of Israel; though, perhaps, the phrase step-motherland would express more truly the actual relationship, both in its origin and its character. Russia has inherited her tremendous responsibilities towards the Hebrew race from Poland, and her vexed "Jewish question" is in part a just punishment for her complicity in the wicked partitions of that country in the eighteenth century. The matter, however, goes back much farther than the eighteenth century. In the Middle Ages Poland was a more powerful state than Russia, and comprised territory stretching from the Gulf of Riga to the Black Sea and from the Oder to the Dnieper. She was also the one country in Europe which offered to the Jews security from persecution and an opportunity of developing the commercial instincts of the race without interference. The result was that Jews settled in large numbers all over the King of Poland's possessions, and the presence of Jews in any part of modern Russia is almost a sure sign that that particular town or province has been Polish territory in former times. The Russian Government has never, except for a short period, allowed the Jews to live in Russia proper, and it is very rare to find Jews in north or central Russia. Even in large cities like Petrograd and Moscow their numbers are small, while it is interesting to note that the Finns have copied the rest of Russia in this respect at least that they have always resolutely refused to admit the Hebrew. Where Russia found Jews among the new subjects which she acquired by her gradual encroachments upon Poland, she had of course to let them remain, but she has confined them strictly to these districts. The existence of this Jewish pale is one of the grievances of the Jews of Russia, but it is not the heaviest. The liberal-minded Alexander II. had shown himself lenient to them; but his assassination in 1881 at the hands of terrorists and the accession of the reactionary Alexander III. began a period of persecution which has continued until the present day.

Alexander III. was much influenced by his tutor, Pobiedonostsev, who for the next thirty years was the most prominent exponent of the philosophy of Slavophilism. This, which in its modern form may be traced back to 1835, was in fact nothing else than a perverted glorification of the Russian national characteristics which have been dwelt upon above. The Slavophils declared not only that the Russians were a great and admirable nation, which few who really know them will be disposed to deny, but that their institutions—and in particular, of course, autocracy and bureaucracy—were a perfect expression of the national genius which could hardly be improved upon. Furthermore, it was maintained that, since all other countries but Russia had taken a wrong turn and fallen into decadence and libertinism, it was Russia's mission to bring the world back into the paths of rectitude and virtue by extending the influence of her peculiar culture—and in particular again, of course, its special manifestations, autocracy and bureaucracy—as widely as possible. A variant of Slavophilism is Panslavism, which works for the day when all members of one great Slav race will be united in one nation, presumably under the Russian crown. Both these movements are examples of that nationalism run mad to which reference has been made in the second chapter.[1] But the Slavophils, who are of course ardent supporters of the Orthodox Church, were faced at the outset with a great difficulty; the western provinces of Russia, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, contained masses of population which were neither Russian nor Orthodox. The Finns in the north were Lutherans; the Poles in the centre, though Slavs, were Roman Catholic in religion and anti-Russian in sentiment; and the Jews in the centre and south were—Jews. The first step, therefore, towards the Slavophil goal was the "Russification" of the subject peoples of Russia. In theory "Russification" means conferring the benefits of Russian customs, speech, and culture upon those who do not already possess them; in practice it amounts to the suppression of local liberties and traditions.

[Footnote 1: See p. 57.]

It is obvious that it is no easier to make a Jew into a Russian by force than to change the skin of the proverbial Ethiopian; nor is it likely that the Russian Government ever entertained the idea of making such an attempt. If it had any definite plan at all, it was to render things so uncomfortable to the unfortunate Hebrews that they would gradually leave the country. Real persecution began at the accession of Alexander III. in 1881, when it spread into Russia, significantly enough, from Germany, where a violent anti-Semite agitation had sprung up at the beginning of the year. Riots directed against the Jews, and winked at if not encouraged by the authorities, broke out in the towns of Southern Russia. Edicts followed which excluded the Jews from all direct share in local government, refused to allow more than a small percentage of Jews to attend the schools and universities, forbade them to acquire property outside the towns, laid special taxes upon their backs, and so on. This attitude of the Government encouraged the populace of the towns to believe that they might attack the Jews with impunity. The Jews are regarded in modern Russia in much the same light as they were regarded by our forefathers in the Middle Ages. They are hated, that is to say, on two counts: as unbelievers and as usurers. The condition of affairs in a township where the population is half-Jewish, half-Christian, and where the Christians are financially and commercially in the hands of the Jews, and the Jews are politically and administratively in the hands of the Christians, is obviously an extremely dangerous one. Add to this the presence of a large hooligan section which is found in almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the police, and you get a train of circumstances which lead inevitably to those violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as pogroms, which have stained the pages of modern Russian history. The revolutionary movement has complicated matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and its hooligan supporters have tended to identify the Jewish race with the Revolutionary Party. Nothing can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which, instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done more than anything else to "Russify" the latter, has persistently aided and abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence. It has reaped its reward in the rise of one of the most formidable of the revolutionary parties in modern Russia, the so-called Jewish "Bund." The Governor of Vilna, in a confidential report written in 1903, declared that "this political movement is undoubtedly a result of the abnormal position of the Jews, legal and economic, which has been created by our legislation. A revision of the laws concerning the Jews is absolutely urgent, and every postponement of it is pregnant with the most dangerous consequences."

Yet when we condemn Russia for her pogroms and her Jew-baitings, we must not forget two facts: first, that these occurrences are the work, not of the real Russian people, the peasantry which has been described above, but of the dregs of the population which are to be found at the base of the social structure in the towns of Russia as in towns nearer home; second, that Russia is not the only country in the world that has these racial problems to face. I once heard a Russian and an American discussing the comparative demerits of their respective lands, and I am bound to say that the former held his own very well. When, for example, the American said, "What about the Jews?" the other answered, "Well, what about the negroes?" and he parried the further question, "What about pogroms?" with another of his own, "What about lynching?" The problems are not, of course, quite on all fours, nor do two wrongs make a right, but a reminder that similar problems exist in other parts of the world will perhaps be enough to show that the Jewish question in Russia is neither unique nor at all easy to solve. Let us, instead of visiting the sins of a few townships upon the heads of the entire Russian nation, be thankful that we have no such problems in our own islands. Recent riots outside the shops of German pork-butchers in different parts of the country do not, it must be confessed, lead one to hope that our people would behave much more calmly and discreetly than the Whites of the Southern States or the Christians of South-West Russia, were they placed in the same circumstances.