Page:The American Review of Reviews - Volume 24.djvu/57

 have nothing to do, or despise it actively as a fetter which retards the development of their internal life. Western life differs from Russian m being rich in outward manifestations, civic, political, and artistic. The law is necessary to it, and it regards the law as the crown and safeguard of its being. The life of the Russian people is less expansive, and they do not regard the law as an active factor."

"But surely Russians submit to their own laws as much as we?"

"They submit to them, but they are not guided by them. It is not their submission, but their neglect of the law, which makes our people so peaceful and long-suffering. And that neglect of the law is also what makes our officials the greatest knaves in the world. You ask why? Because the mass of the people, while they despise external restrictions, are guided by their consciences. But our educated officials continue to neglect the law, and they have emancipated themselves from their consciences. They have neither principle nor restraint, and in consequence become what they are.

"When I say that the Russians are led by conscience, I do not mean to say that there is less crime and preventable misery among them than in Europe. I merely say that conscience plays here the part played by law in the West, and just as your law fails to secure freedom from crime, so conscience here, through ignorance and error, is not infallible. The difference in practice is that the Russian peasant is quite incapable of feeling contempt or anger against a criminal. He reasons that the criminal is a man who has gone astray either from failure of judgment or through passion. This is the truth about all so-called uneducated Russians. The lower officials in Siberia, in direct defiance of the law, permit homeless convicts to pass the night in the public baths. Whatever government regulations may lay down in regard to the treatment of criminals, their general treatment is sympathetic and kindly."

"But surely Russian history shows cases of gross cruelty toward criminals?"

"Gross cruelty does take place, and when it does take place it is even worse than the cruelty of European officials, for the same neglect of the law manifests itself here. But the systematic treatment of criminals as inferior beings is unknown here and inconceivable. Your prison officials may break the law by ill-treating their charges. But they never break it by indulging them. Ours break it both ways, according to the state of their consciences."

I asked the count if he could define what, then, he regarded as the essential difference between the Russians and western Europeans.

"The difference lies in this," he answered, emphatically, "and it is quite evident to those who know them. It is that they are more Christian—more Christian. And that distinction arises not from the fact that they are of lower culture, but from the spirit of the people, and that for centuries and centuries they have found in the teachings of Christ their only guide and protection. Your people, from the time of the Reformation, have read their Bibles intelligently and read them critically. Ours have never read them, and are only beginning to read them now. But the Russian people have preserved the tradition and the teaching of Christ, and in the absence of protective laws and institutions, such as have always existed m the West, where else should they seek for guidance of their lives? It is this element, this reliance upon conscience and Christianity as opposed to law, which forms the great gulf between Russia and western Europe. Between Western countries there has always seemed to me very little difference. The conception of the French as vain, of the Italians as excitable, of your own countrymen as cold and calculating, may be very true. But to a Russian they are but sections of a general empire, in essentials the same, but all differing from Russia by their material spirit and their legal basis. In