, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many
brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict
to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy
for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever,
touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing
of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict
with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.

"Haldin means disruption," he thought to himself, beginning to walk
again. "What is he with his indignation, with his talk of bondage--with
his talk of God's justice? All that means disruption. Better that
thousands should suffer than that a people should become a disintegrated
mass, helpless like dust in the wind. Obscurantism is better than the
light of incendiary torches. The seed germinates in the night. Out of
the dark soil springs the perfect plant. But a volcanic eruption
is sterile, the ruin of the fertile ground. And am I, who love my
country--who have nothing but that to love and put my faith in--am I
to have my future, perhaps my usefulness, ruined by this sanguinary
fanatic?"

The grace entered into Razumov. He believed now in the man who would
come at the appointed time.

What is a throne? A few pieces of wood upholstered in velvet. But a
throne is a seat of power too. The form of government is the shape of
a tool--an instrument. But twenty thousand bladders inflated by the
noblest sentiments and jostling against each other in the air are a
miserable incumbrance of space, holding no power, possessing no will,
having nothing to give.

He went on thus, heedless of the way, holding a discourse with himself
with extraordinary abundance and facility. Generally his phrases came
to him slowly, after a conscious and painstaking wooing. Some superior
power had inspired him with a flow of masterly argument as certain
converted sinners become overwhelmingly loquacious.

He felt an austere exultation.

"What are the luridly smoky lucubrations of that fellow to the clear
grasp of my intellect?" he thought. "Is not this my country? Have I not
got forty million brothers?" he asked himself, unanswerably victorious
in the silence of his breast. And the fearful thrashing he had given
the inanimate Ziemianitch seemed to him a sign of intimate union, a
pathetically severe necessity of brotherly love. "No! If I must suffer
let me at least suffer for my convi