Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Terror in Russia (1909).djvu/13

2 taken to eliminate all facts and accusations which have not been authenticated. Either they have been officially corroborated by sentences of the Courts pronounced upon police and prison officials convicted of gross abuses of their powers; or they were the subject of interpellations in the Duma, and were not contradicted by the Ministry; or they were reported in the moderate papers of the Russian daily Press, with a full specification of names and dates, notwithstanding all the rigours of censorship, and were not contradicted either by the official "Information Bureau" or the official and semi-official organs of the Press. Any evidence which, although substantially correct, might have been suspected of exaggeration, has been carefully excluded.

There is no question that the movement of the years 1905–1907 has produced a deep change in the whole aspect of thought and sentiment in Russia. The peasant, the workman, the clerk, the small tradesman are no longer so submissive to every rural police officer as they formerly were. New ideas, new aspirations, new hopes, and, above all, a new interest in public life have been developed in them, since it was officially declared in October, 1905, that the nation would henceforward have the right to express its wishes and to exercise legislative power through its representatives, and that the policy of the Government would be a liberal policy. But, after it had been solemnly declared that the political life of the country was to be reconstructed on new principles, and that, to use the very words of the Tsar's Manifesto, "the population is to be given the inviolable foundation of civil rights, based on the actual inviolability of the person, and freedom of belief, of speech, of organisation, and meeting"—after that declaration had been solemnly promulgated, those who tried to realise these principles have been treated as rebels, guilty of high treason.

Not only are the representatives of the advanced parties prosecuted for all they said and did during the years 1906–1907, but even the most moderate party, the Octobrists, who take their standpoint on the letter of the October manifesto, are treated by the officials, high and low, of M. Stolypin's Government as preaching treasonable doctrines. The only