Page:Memoirs of a revolutionist volume 1.djvu/14

 X MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST

Nicholas, or running after the Emperor Alexander as his page, with the idea of protecting him. And then again Kropotkin in a terrible prison, sending away the Grand Duke Nicholas, or listening to the growing insanity of a peasant who is confined in a cell under his very feet.

He has lived the life of the aristocrat and of the worker ; he has been one of the Emperor's pages and a poverty-stricken writer ; he has lived the life of the student, the officer, the man of science, the explorer of unknown lands, the administrator, and the hunted revolutionist. In exile he has had at times to live upon bread and tea as a Eussian peasant ; and he has been exposed to espionage and assassination plots like a Eussian emperor.

Few men have had an equally wide field of ex- perience. Just as Kropotkin is able, as a geologist, to survey prehistoric evolution for hundreds of thousands of years past, so too he has assimilated the whole historical evolution of his own times. To the Literary and scientific education which is won in the study and in the university (such as the knowledge of languages, belles-lettres, philosophy, and higher mathematics), he added at an early stage of his life that education which is gained in the workshop, in the laboratory, and in the open field natural science, military science, fortifica- tion, knowledge of mechanical and industrial processes. His intellectual equipment is universal.

What must this active mind have suffered when he was reduced to the inactivity of prison life ! What a