Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/470

This page needs to be proofread.
454
SIBERIA

"spontaneously" beloved, and against the "monarchical institutions" to which all Russians, except telegraphers, school-boys, Jews, and loose women, were so "sincerely devoted." But it is unnecessary to press the inquiry. Every thoughtful student of human affairs must see the absurdity of the supposition that a few telegraph-operators, school-boys, Jews, and loose women could seriously imperil the existence of a Government like that of Russia.

As a matter of fact the Russian terrorists were men and women of extraordinary ability, courage, and fortitude; of essentially noble nature; and of limitless capacity for heroic self-sacrifice. Professor Lombroso, perhaps the first criminal anthropologist in Europe, who has had an opportunity to study the heads and faces of a number of these people, and to compare them with the heads and faces of communists and anarchists, speaks of them as follows:

It is for me a thoroughly established fact, and one of which I have given the proofs in my "Delitto Politico," that true revolutionists, that is to say, the initiators of great scientific and political revolutions, who excite and bring about a true progress in humanity, are almost always geniuses or saints, and have a marvelously harmonious physiognomy; and to verify this it is sufficient simply to look at the plates in my "Delitto Politico." What noble physiognomies have Paoli, Fabrizi, Dandolo, Moro, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bandiera, Pisacane, Perófskaya [Sophie Perófskaya, one of the assassins of Alexander II.], and Zasúlich [Véra Zasúlich, who shot General Trepóf, the St. Petersburg chief of police]. ... In a study that I have made with 321 of our Italian revolutionists [against Austria, etc.] the proportion of the criminal type was 0.57 per cent., i.e., 2 per cent. less than in normal men. Out of 30 celebrated nihilists 18 have a very fine physiognomy, 12 present some isolated anomalies, 2 only present the criminal type — that is to say, 6.8 per cent. And if from these unfortunate men, who represent to us, even psychologically, the Christian martyrs, we pass to the regicides, to the presidenticides, such as Fieschi, Guiteau, Nobiling and the monsters of the French Revolution of 1789, such as Carrier, Jourdan, and Marat, we there at once find in all, or in nearly all, the criminal type. And again the type