Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/455

Rh more than an embittered revolutionist, who has found it impossible to unite and organize the disaffected elements of society in the face of a cloud of spies, an immense body of police, and a standing army; who has been exasperated to the last degree by cruel, unjust, and lawless treatment of himself, his family, or his friends; who has been smitten in the face every time he has opened his lips to explain or expostulate, and who, at last, has been seized with the Berserker madness, and has become, in the words of the St. Petersburg Gólos, "a wild beast capable of anything."

In point of numerical strength these three classes follow one another in the order in which I have placed them. The liberals, who are the most numerous, probably comprise three-fourths of all the university graduates in the Empire outside of the bureaucracy. The revolutionists, who come next, undoubtedly number tens of thousands, but, under existing circumstances, it is impossible to make a trustworthy estimate of their strength, and all that I feel safe in saying is that, numerically, they fall far short of the liberals. The terrorists never were more than a meager handful in comparison with the population of the country, and they constituted only a fraction even of the anti-Government party; but they were resolute and daring men and women, and they attracted more attention abroad, of course, than a thousand times as many liberals, simply on account of the tragic nature of the rôles that they played on the stage of Russian public life. The liberals, who were limited by the censorship and the police on one side, and by their own renunciation of violence on the other, could do very little to attract the attention of foreign observers; but the terrorists, who defied all restrictions, who carried their lives constantly in their hands, and who waged war with dagger, pistol, and pyroxylin bomb, acquired a notoriety that was out of all proportion to their numerical strength.