Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/568

Rh deliberate, he was able to estimate very accurately the errors of the revolution, and yet would not allow these errors to confuse his mind as to the general necessity of the movement. Paine, and here he stood alone, had the courage to defend Louis XVI, saying, "Kill the king, not the man," thus modifying Augustine's maxim, "Diligite homines, interficite errores." Paine, too, was valiant enough to defend the republic and democracy against his brother revolutionaries.

The Russian revolutionaries lack Paine's qualities. The errors of the revolutionary movement alarmed Herzen, and warped his judgment both of Europe and of Russia. Bakunin clung to revolution, but his revolutionism was blind; it is always Bakunin to whom Russians appeal, to Bakunin's doctrine of revolutionary instinct, when what is requisite is intelligent revolutionary conviction. Černyševskii might perchance have developed into a Russian Paine, had he not been monstrously condemned to a living death in Siberia. But the Russian, who continues to believe uncritically in myth, still expects the revolution to work miracles. What Russians need, in a word, is a Kant to apply criticism to their revolutionary doctrines. For lack of such a Kant, they have never got beyond Stepniak's Old Testament theory of a life for a life.

The Russians are apt to forget that their goal is not revolution, but democracy; and Russian revolutionism readily lapses into anarchism and nihilism. Bakunin was perfectly right in demanding a new ethic for Russia and for Europe, but he was unable to guide his own actions consistently in accordance with the doctrines of this new ethic. A democrat in theory, he was an aristocrat in practice.

The new ethic is the ethic of democratic equality, and democratic equality demands critical thought. The Russian revolutionaries (and notably Mihailovskii) recognised that as a preliminary step the old ideas and customs must be destroyed, but the Russian revolutionary is himself none the less apt to cherish the old ideas and to follow the-old customs. He desires to be free, but cannot abandon the tradition and the persistent habits of serfdom. The first revolutionaries were the first of the emancipated serfs. It is not to the point to object that most of the revolutionaries were in actual fact members of the free, the aristocratic caste, for slavery was the social and spiritual condition alike of masters and of slaves.