is a
humane country may sound strange in English ears. Yet capital punishment,
which is still part of our legal system, was abolished in Russia as long
ago as 1753, except for cases of high treason. From 1855 to 1876 only one
man was executed in the whole of that vast empire; and from 1876 to 1903
only 114. On the other hand between the years 1905 and 1908 the total of
executions reached the appalling figure of 3629. This is but to translate
into criminal statistics the story just quoted; for the years 1905-8 were
the years when martial law reigned in Russia, the years of revolution.
The Tsar, it is true, wore the black cap, and the hangman's rope was
manipulated by the bureaucracy, but the jury who brought in the verdict was
a jury of 145 million peasants.

Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which
is still so greatly misunderstood in England. It was not the uprising of an
oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by
the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of
a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after
fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the
revolutionaries. There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding
amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress
in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive.
All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible
bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the _pogrom_, and Siberia
for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing
conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and
revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying,
the "Marseillaise" on their lips, with the fortitude of Christian martyrs.
But, beneath all this, something immensely bigger was in progress,
which can only be described as a conflict of two philosophies of life
diametrically opposed or, if you like, a life-and-death struggle between
two civilisations, so different that they can hardly understand each
other's language; it is a renewal of the Titanic contest, which was decided
in the West by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the contest between
the mediaeval and the modern world. To the modern mind no period is so
difficult to grasp as the Middle Ages; our dreams are of progress which is
another word for process, of success which impli