Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/353

Rh the philosophy of a convict which I referred to once before.

"Never despair, because to-morrow is always better than to-day. If to-day life is grim and hard to endure, then the severer trials of the morrow will not be felt so acutely, as one has already become accustomed to suffering. And when bad days shall last for a long time, your whole being will finally yearn for death, so that what is usually looked upon as the most terrible end of everything will come to be, instead of the worst that can happen to you, something to be desired. Also, when a bad day is followed by a little improvement in the morrow, then you will be quite happy with the change for the better. To-morrow is always better than to-day!"

Of course, to men of action and of a fighting spirit this is a slave psychology, the blind guiding power of a slave advancing along the road of life without a will and without ambition, entirely dominated by this force of Fate. For the ordinary Russian, in the grinding conditions of his existence under the governmental systems he has known, this slave psychology is, however paradoxical it may seem in this context, really a saving code of life.

The third national expression referred to is that frequently used word "Avos," which is so difficult to translate.

"Will you have time to get your hay into the barn before the rain?" you ask a Russian peasant.

"Avos," he will answer and will mean something akin to "Perhaps." But this nearest English equivalent indicates, after all, the existence of some real reasons which may exert a good or bad influence upon the work in hand. When one says "Perhaps," the mind takes into consideration all the possibilites, both material and psychological;