religion which they already know, and which can alone deliver them from
their calamities. So that the only certain means of man's salvation
consists merely in ceasing to do that which hinders men from assimilating
the true religion which already lives in their consciousness.

XI

I had finished this writing when news came of the destruction of six
hundred innocent lives opposite Port Arthur. It would seem that the
useless suffering and death of these unfortunate deluded men who have
needlessly and so dreadfully perished ought to disabuse those who were
the cause of this destruction. I am not alluding to Makaroff and other
officers--all these men knew what they were doing, and wherefore, and
they voluntarily, for personal advantage, for ambition, did as they did,
disguising themselves in pretended patriotism, a pretence not condemned
merely because it is universal. I allude rather to those unfortunate men
drawn from all parts of Russia, who, by the help of religious fraud, and
under fear of punishment, have been torn from an honest, reasonable,
useful, laborious family life, driven to the other end of the world,
placed on a cruel, senseless machine for slaughter, and torn to bits,
drowned along with this stupid machine in a distant sea, without any need
or any possibility of advantage from all their privations, efforts, and
sufferings, or from the death which overtook them.

In 1830, during the Polish war, the adjutant Vilijinsky sent to St.
Petersburg by Klopitsky, in a conversation held in French with Dibitch,
in answer to the latter's demand that the Russian troops should enter
Poland, said to him:--

"Monsieur le Marechal, I think that in that case it will be quite
impossible for the Polish nation to accept this manifesto...."

"Believe me, the Emperor will make no further concessions."

"Then I foresee that, unhappily, there will be war, that much blood will
be shed, there will be many unfortunate victims."

"Do not think so; at most there will be ten thousand who will perish on
both sides, and that is all,"[1] said Dibitch in his German accent, quite
confident that he, together with another man as cruel and foreign to
Russian and Polish life as he was himself,--Nicholas I,--had the right to
condemn or not to condemn to death ten or a hundred thousand Russians and
Poles.

[1] Vilijinsky adds on his own behalf, "The Field-Marshal did not then
think that mor