Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/89

 weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the plague spots where men's lives were being mown down at the devastating stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts, the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had been with them when their very souls lay bare.

What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate; but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we mean the "will to life" which animates the savage man. And I now say, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their 85