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 CHAPTER VII. SOME OF THE MARTYRS.

measure of persecution is apparently too mean to be put in force against the Stundists. Petty espionage by miserable policemen in the villages; inquisitorial questionings by the priests; deeds of inconceivable vileness by the village authorities—those are the tactics pursued by the mighty Russian government against a harmless handful of their subjects, whose only request is to worship God in peace and truth. Religious intolerance is just as rampant in Russia to-day as it was in England during the reigns of the Tudors, and it is only prevented from going to the extremes of personal torture and the public stake by the dread of Western opinion. In the last two chapters on this subject we have endeavoured to place before our readers a few of the more notable cases of persecution which disgraced the years previous to 1888; space does not allow us to describe a tenth of them. From 1888 onwards the policy of extermination seems to have taken the place of simple repression, and wholesale banishment and imprisonment, not only of the leaders but of ordinary members of the Stundist community, was of constant occurrence. There was hardly a provincial gaol all over the South of Russia that did not contain representatives of Russian Protestantism; there was seldom a miserable gang of prisoners making its way to Siberia or Transcaucasia that lacked a Stundist preacher. So great were the numbers sent across the Caucasus to the province