truth of the above description as far as
the rank and file of the modern revolutionary school are concerned.[1] Such
people were divided by a whole universe from the peasants to whom they
offered themselves as leaders and saviours; and the schemes of regeneration
which they preached were not merely useless, because purely negative, but
were exotic plants which could never flourish on Russian soil. Thus the
revolution triumphed for about twelve months as a purely destructive force,
but when the necessity for construction arose its adherents found that they
were entirely ignorant of the elements of the problem before them.
This problem was the peasant, and the revolutionaries, though they had
worshipped the People (with a capital P) for years and had done their best
to convert them, had never made any attempt to understand them. And when
the peasant discovered what the revolutionary was like, he loathed and
detested him. "They hate us," a writer in _Landmarks_ confesses, "because
they fail to recognise that we are men. We are, in their eyes, monsters in
human shape, men without God in their soul; and they are right."

[Footnote 1: It is confirmed by all impartial observers, see _e.g._
Professor Pares' _Russia and Reform_, chap. ix., entitled "Lives of the
Intelligents."]

There is a characteristic story told by Mr. Maurice Baring about a certain
revolutionary who one day arrived at a village to convert the inhabitants
to socialism. "He thought he would begin by disproving the existence of
God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow
that there should be no Emperor and no policeman. So he took a holy picture
and said, 'There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit
upon this _eikon_ and break it in pieces, and if there is a God He will
send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will
happen to me at all.' Then he took the _eikon_ and spat upon it and broke
it to bits, and he said to the peasants, 'You see, God has not killed me.'
'No,' said the peasants, 'God has not killed you, but we will'; and they
killed him."

This story, whether true or not, is a parable, in which one may read the
whole meaning of the failure of the Russian revolution. It shows how an
attack upon what they hold sacred may rouse to acts of fury a people
who are admitted by all who know them to be the most tolerant, most
tender-hearted, and most humane in Europe. The notion that Russia