Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/466

450 article upon the treatment of the Jews in Russia which was published in the Forum for August, 1891; and, finally, the novels, stories, and sketches of the political exiles Korolénko, Máchtet, Staniukóvich, Mámin [Sibiriák], and Petropávlovski are known to every cultivated Russian from the White Sea to the Caspian and from Poland to the Pacific.

Morally, the Russian revolutionists whom I met in Siberia would compare favorably with any body of men and women of equal numerical strength that I could collect from the circle of my own acquaintances. I do not share the opinions of all of them; some of them seem to me to entertain visionary and over-sanguine hopes and plans for the future of their country; some of them have made terrible and fatal mistakes of judgment; and some of them have proved weak or unworthy in the hour of trial; but it is my deliberate conviction, nevertheless, that, tested by any moral standard of which I have knowledge, such political exiles as Volkhófski, Chudnófski, Blok, Leóntief, Lobonófski, Kropótkin, Kohan-Bérnstein, Belokónski, Prisédski, Lázaref, Charúshin, Kléments, Shishkó, Nathalie Armfeldt, Heléne Máchtet, Sophie Bárdina, Anna Pávlovna Korbá, and many others whom I have not space to name, represent the flower of Russian young manhood and young womanhood. General Strélnikof may call them "fanatics" and "robbers," and Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy may describe them as "wretched men and women ... whose social