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 among the Russian peasants, and during all that time in the great mass of genuine Russian peasants I never once saw or heard the feeling of patriotism manifested or expressed, with the exception of those patriotic phrases learned during military service or repeated from books by the most frivolous and degenerate of the peasants. I have never heard feelings of patriotism expressed by the people, but, on the contrary, I am continually hearing from the most serious and estimable men among the peasants expressions of complete indifference and even contempt for all manifestations of patriotism. I have observed the same thing among the working people of other countries, and educated Frenchmen, Germans, and Englishmen have more than once told me the same thing about their working classes.

The working people are too much taken up with the work of maintaining the life of themselves and their families, which absorbs their whole attention, for them to be able to be interested in the political questions that are the chief motive of patriotism; the questions of the influence of Russia in the East, of the unity of Germany, or of the restoration to France of her lost provinces, or of the cession of this or that part of one state to another, and so on, do not interest them—not only because they scarcely ever know the conditions under which these questions arise, but also because the