d to the regime of the knout or the darkness of the
mines[234]. According to present appearances the persecutors have
succeeded. The evangelical faith seems to have been almost stamped out
even in South Russia; and the Greek Church has regained its hold on the
allegiance, if not on the beliefs and affections, of the masses.

[Footnote 234: See an article by Count Leo Tolstoy in the _Contemporary
Review_ for November 1895; also a pamphlet on "The Stundists," with
Preface by Rev. J. Brown, D.D.]

To account for this fact, we must remember the immense force of
tradition and custom among a simple rural folk, also that very many
Russians sincerely believe that their institutions and their national
creed were destined to regenerate Europe. See, they said in effect,
Western Europe oscillates between papal control and free thought; its
industries, with their _laissez faire_ methods, raise the few to
enormous wealth and crush the many into a new serfdom worse than the
old. For all these evils Russia has a cure; her autocracy saves her from
the profitless wrangling of Parliaments; her national Church sums up the
beliefs and traditions of nobles and peasants; and at the base of her
social system she possesses in the "Mir" a patriarchal communism against
which the forces of the West will beat in vain. Looking on the Greek
Church as a necessary part of the national life, they sought to wield
its powers for nationalising all the races of that motley Empire.
"Russia for the Russians," cried the Slavophils. "Let us be one people,
with one creed. Let us reverence the Czar as head of the Church and of
the State. In this unity lies our strength." However defective the
argument logically, yet in the realm of sentiment, in which the Slavs
live, move, and have their being, the plea passed muster. National pride
was pressed into the service of the persecutors; and all dissenters,
whether Roman Catholics of Poland, Lutherans of the Baltic Provinces, or
Stundists of the Ukraine, felt the remorseless grinding of the State
machine, while the Greek Church exalted its horn as it had not done for
a century past.

Other sides of this narrowly nationalising policy were seen in the
determined repression of Polish feelings, of the Germans in the Baltic
provinces, and of the Armenians of Transcaucasia. Finally, remorseless
pressure was brought to bear on that interesting people, the Finns. We
can here refer only to the last of these topics. The Germans