could they very well realize the
moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated
Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners
are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of
no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity
against Russian tyranny. And the Tzar's Government, stupidly confident
in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning
from the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the
aggravation of brutalities. Not satisfied with slowly killing its
prisoners, and with burying the flower of our young generation in the
Siberian desserts, the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break
their spirit by deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of
brutality and degradation."

When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan's
revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly
figures fail to typify the Czar's government, and that one must descend
into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement
of the objects of the several liberation-parties--and is disappointed.
Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell
entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.

I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of
the rattlesnake: it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.
Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it
differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it
somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and
fine, when properly "modified," something entitling it to protection
from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole. It
seems a most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition
that man is a reasoning being. If a house is afire, we reason
confidently that it is the first comer's plain duty to put the fire out
in any way he can--drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use
any and all means to stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of
the city. What is the Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of
a city of eighty millions of inhabitants? Yet instead of extinguishing
him, together with his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all
anxious to merely cool him down a little and keep him.

It seems to me that this is illogical--idiot