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FROM PRESIDENT TO PRISON

that people became quite accustomed to it. When leaving the house, one would ask:

"Can one use the Nevsky Prospect to-day? Are they shooting?"

"Of course they are," was the answer frequently received. "But you can pass, because to-day they are shooting along the left side of the street only, so that you can travel on the right."

This was, is and surely will continue to be for a long time still the manner of the authorities in dealing with the people, whom they have always regarded merely as cattle without rights and accustomed to most monstrous measures of repression. Watchwords have changed but the system of government has remained the same. It is illegality and violence. The Russians learned this terrible method, as they groaned for three hundred years under the yoke of the descendants of Jenghiz Khan, these Tartar conquerors who held a bloody hand over the immense state whose bournes they did not rightly know.

During the early period of the outbreak in St. Petersburg my business compelled me to go to Warsaw for a few days. The Revolution reached here very soon.

Poland, ruthlessly partitioned one hundred and fifty years ago by Russia, Austria and Prussia, suffered most in Warsaw because of the violence of the St. Petersburg overlordship. The reflection of this was often seen in the European Press, where violent comment and protests were made against the pogroms or wholesale massacres of the Jews. Yet no one raised his voice against the continuing martyrdom of Poland. From time to time the secret police in the Warsaw fortress hung or shot hundreds of Poles who dared to raise their voices in protest against the lawlessness of the Russian authorities, these men who closed the churches and Polish schools,