erial amelioration are assumed,
honesty will at last raise her protest and hypocrites be no longer
allowed to reap the harvest of a quiet lie.

It is an advance. As history counts time it is a rapid advance. Now that
Russia is reducing Finland to a state of entire subjection without even
a pretext of right or the shadow of a pretence at improved civilisation,
a general feeling of shame and loss pervades Europe. The governments do
not move, but here and there the peoples raise a protest. Not even the
most thorough-going champions of Imperialism, such as the _Times_, have
ventured to defend the action. They have contented themselves with
Cain's excuse that the murder was no affair of ours. A century and a
half ago they would not have needed an excuse. No protest would have
been raised, for it did not matter what nationality was enslaved. There
is an advance, and we have now to extend it. In regard to races already
subject, we have but to act up to the pleadings of our own hypocrisy; we
have to maintain among them equal justice, equal rights and equal
consideration as members of one great community, instead of depriving
them of their manhood and kicking them out of their own railway
carriages. We have to train them on the way to self-government, instead
of clapping them into prison if they mention the subject.

And in regard to nationalities that still retain their freedom, we must
bring our governments up into line with the leading thought of the day.
We must show them that the destruction of a free people like Finland or
Persia is not a local or distant disaster only, but affects the whole
community of nations and spreads like a poison, blighting the growth of
freedom in every land and encouraging all the black forces of tyranny,
darkness, and suppression. Rapidly growing among us, there is already a
certain solidarity between free States, and the problem of the immediate
future is how to make their common action effective on the side of
liberty. When I saw Tolstoy during the Russian revolution of 1905 he
said to me:

"The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even
a revolution; it is the end of an age. The age that is ending
is the age of Empires--the collection of smaller States under
one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought
between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus and all our
other States and races. And what has Hungary, Bohemia,
Syria, or the Tyrol to do with