thy capacity for work and sane
ambitions. He has an average conscience. If he is slightly abnormal it
is only in his sensitiveness to his position. Being nobody's child he
feels rather more keenly than another would that he is a Russian--or he
is nothing. He is perfectly right in looking on all Russia as his
heritage. The sanguinary futility of the crimes and the sacrifices
seething in that amorphous mass envelops and crushes him. But I don't
think that in his distraction he is ever monstrous. Nobody is exhibited
as a monster here--neither the simple-minded Tekla nor the wrong-headed
Sophia Antonovna. Peter Ivanovitch and Madame de S. are fair game. They
are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces
deserve. As to Nikita--nicknamed Necator--he is the perfect flower of
the terroristic wilderness. What troubled me most in dealing with him
was not his monstrosity but his banality. He has been exhibited to the
public eye for years in so-called "disclosures" in newspaper articles,
in secret histories, in sensational novels.

The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that
all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the
general--of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The
ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and
in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less
imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism
encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange
conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall
of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all
they can effect is merely a change of names. The oppressors and the
oppressed are all Russians together; and the world is brought once more
face to face with the truth of the saying that the tiger cannot change
his stripes nor the leopard his spots.

J. C.

1920.

A PERSONAL RECORD

The re-issue of this book in a new form does not, strictly speaking,
require another Preface. But since this is distinctly a place for
personal remarks I take the opportunity to refer in this Author's Note
to two points arising from certain statements about myself I have
noticed of late in the press.

One of them bears upon the question of language. I have always felt
myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position
which outside the circus world cann