Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/17

Rh village, the majority are trampling the minority under foot. The minority succumbs when resistance is no longer possible, and counterfeits a submission which conceals a secret intensity of rage that makes them long to compass the destruction of the Empire, as the only possibility of relief. In Russia there is such a condition of affairs that we can almost describe it as primitive barbarism. The Government is deaf to every suggestion of mutual rights and advantages; the public official has no care for the interests of the country and of the people that are confided to him, but thinks only of his own, which he shamelessly promotes by robbery or theft, and by corruptibility and prostitution of the laws. The cultivated classes in their despair have grasped Nihilism as their weapon against the present insupportable state of things, and risk their lives again and again, with dynamite and revolver, with the dagger and the torch of the incendiary, to precipitate the country into that bloody chaos, which, in their delirium, they imagine must precede the establishment of a new system of society. The statesmen who are called upon to devise a cure for this horrible disease propose the most astonishing remedies. One guarantees a cure if the Russian people be declared of age and invested with the right of legislative representation; another has confidence alone in a decisive leap backwards into the slough of Asiatic intolerance, and demands the eradication of all European innovations, with an extension of the power of the sacred and inherited despotism of the Czar; a third believes in the efficacy of a counter-irritant, and recommends a brisk, merry war against Germany, Austria, Turkey, or the whole world combined, if need be. The dark mass of the people however, entertains itself by plundering and killing the Jews, during these tedious consultations of its