Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/472

fare, as in chess, you cannot disregard all the rules of the game yourself and then expect your adversary to observe them. The Government first set the example of lawlessness in Russia by arresting without warrant; by punishing without trial; by cynically disregarding the judgments of its own courts when such judgments were in favor of politicals; by confiscating the money and property of private citizens whom it merely suspected of sympathy with the revolutionary movement; by sending fourteen-year-old boys and girls to Siberia; by kidnapping the children of "politically untrustworthy" people and exiles and putting them into state asylums; by driving men and women to insanity and suicide in rigorous solitary confinement without giving them a trial; by burying secretly at night the bodies of the people whom it had thus done to death in its dungeons; and by treating as a criminal, in posse if not in esse, every citizen who dared to ask why or wherefore. A man is not necessarily a ferocious, blood-thirsty fanatic, if, under such provocation, and in the absence of all means of redress, he strikes back with the weapons that lie nearest his hand. It is not my purpose to justify the policy of the terrorists, nor to approve, even by implication, the resort to murder as a means of tempering despotism; but it is my purpose to explain, so far as I can, certain morbid social phenomena; and in making such explanation circumstances seem to lay upon me the duty of saying to the world for the Russian revolutionists and terrorists all that they might fairly say for themselves if the lips of the dead had not already moldered into dust, and if the voices of the living were not lost in the distance or stifled by prison walls. The Russian Government has its own press and its own representatives abroad; it can explain, if it chooses, its methods and measures. The Russian revolutionists, buried alive in remote Siberian solitudes, can only tell their story to an occasional traveler from a freer country, and ask him to lay it before the world for judgment.