Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/484

458 himself. But he realises that in addition to sacrificing himself he has to kill others, and he enquires whether his voluntary sacrifice of himself gives him the right to rule Russia. Such a right cannot be founded on machine guns, any more than it can be founded on the Holy Mass, or on loyalty to the autocracy.

Bělinskii's and Herzen's answer to Černov would have run as follows: "Before the moral maximum can be realised, the times of the moral minimum must be fulfilled." Bělinskii, and subsequently Herzen, protested vigorously against the notion that the ideal, that free resolve, can be made dependent upon the time and upon historical facts. Besides, how is the moral maximum to be realised? For each individual the question takes the definite form, May I kill? If the moral maximum signifies a condition characterised by the non-existence of coercion, will not its realisation be more speedily effected if individuals should decide from the first to abstain from the use of force?

In any case, Ropšin challenges Stepniak's justification of terrorism by an appeal to the law of retaliation. The device, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, seems to him to smack too much of the Old Testament, and to be manifestly unjust.

Other members of the Social Revolutionary Party besides Ropšin were inclined, especially after the Azev disclosures, to doubt the utility, not merely of terrorism, but of the whole method of party organisation, and in particular of the rigid system of aristocratic centralisation. The committee appointed to investigate the Azev affair reported that provocative methods had not made their appearance by chance, for the party constitution fitted it to be the blind tool of an individual. In the party periodicals, increasing expression was given to the view that terrorist methods were unsound.

Černov's "moral minimalism" is not merely vague and obscure, but even from the purely utilitarian outlook it fails to throw light upon the problem of terrorism and revolution.

Plehanov's critique is no less inadequate. First of all, adroitly enough, Plehanov heaps coals of fire upon Ropšin's head and upon the heads of that writer's adversaries (social democrats among the number) by defending Ropšin against the charge of having no independent style. Ropšin had been accused of being a mere imitator, of aping Merežkovskii in