death risks, to which his friends were exposed, and in the end his own death seemed to him nothing more than a means cowards a revolutionary end. He took to heart the saying of Mihailov: "In truth it is no whit easier to die in a room than to die on the battlefield!"
But because of this very indifference, the revolutionary shunned detail work, and when he was forced to undertake it it was because he was attracted to it by the stimulus of danger, not because he desired it as an occupation.
The peculiar technique of revolution made of the revolutionary a specialist who was unfitted for all other work.
This remarkable terrorist occultisms had a powerfully stimulating effect upon the revolutionaries and upon the population at large, for the mysterious, the unforeseen, the inalculable, has ever a strange power.
In his occultism and mysticism, the Russian revolutionary was a zealot, a fanatical autocrat, a revolutionary tsar. Such was Bakunin. Despite his democratic program and his socialistic ideals, the revolutionary, no less than his adversary, was an aristocrat.
In conjunction with revolutionary occultism, there developed a species of revolutionary augurship, and not inaptly did Herzen describe as a new priestly caste, the revolutionary minority which desired to lead the European majority. This augurship readily passed over into Machiavellianism and Jesuitry; a Nečaev was produced as soon as the terrorist outrage ceased to be a duel and became a murder. The revolutionists, as we learn from Lavrov's utterances concerning falsehood, felt how delicate, how terrible, was the situation; and was it not terrible that the revolutionary, who was willing to stake his life unhesitatingly, should in his tactical caution be constrained to falsehood and misrepresentation? The executive committee did no doubt as a rule inform its victims that sentence of death had been passed upon them, but the actual outrage had to be planned and carried out with the utmost secrecy. This hero, this martyr, was one who must be prepared to lie unceasingly. But indeed we shall do well to remember that the hero's death on the field of battle is supplemented by the death of the spy. The Trojan war knew, not Hector alone, but also Ulysses. The revolution, revolutionary organisation, has its tacticians and diplomatists as well as its technicists. It has, moreover, its bureaucrats.
