the state, that they must be hanged without mercy even when they confine their criminal activity to distributing books and quoting texts from the New Testament. He admitted that they die on the scaffold with dignified composure; but such self-control he declared to be "a mere matter of temperament." "Common brigands," he said, often die bravely. "Mere boys," therefore, who are "immature" and "uneducated," who have never shown any courage in the commission of crime, and whose highest aim in life is "selfish personal gain," will die on the scaffold like heroes as a matter of course.
Finally, most Russian revolutionists, in the judgment of the Kiev procureur, are nothing but "common robbers." They go about, it is true, distributing gratuitously books that they have bought with their own money, and quoting from the New Testament the words of Jesus Christ; but that is simply because they are "fanatics." It would doubtless be more profitable and less dangerous to rob with a drill, a crowbar and a dark-lantern; but politicals do not pursue that course because they desire to "play a conspicuous part," to "go on pilgrimages " and so forth, and they expect to rob the poor peasants, as they go, of money enough to buy the books that they distribute, and to compensate themselves for the labor of committing to memory a lot of texts from the Bible. If anybody fails to see the strength and coherence of this chain of reasoning he is "politically untrustworthy," if not "prejudicial to public tranquillity"; and the farther he can keep away from the Russian Empire, the better chance he will have of living out the natural term of his existence.
It seems to me foolish and impolitic for Russian Government officials to try to make it appear that the revolutionists, as a class, are despicable in point of intellectual ability, or morally depraved. They are neither the one nor the other. So far as education is concerned they are far superior to any equal number of Russian officials with whom,
