Chapter IX: Part 9

It is argued that for the bulk of the population, under existing material conditions, schools are of small use. The lack, in the general poverty, of the very primary materials,--paper, pencils, books; of proper shoes and clothes; the unsuitableness of the houses of the peasants as places for the children to prepare their lessons in, with no spot to put their books or to do their tasks and with no available light--all these things strike at the very root of education. The population must be raised economically to the point where the elementals of existence are assured, before the incidental costs of schools can be met by the peasantry. However, there has been coming to Russia during the last generation, in a great wave, the kind of education that made the American West--the education of expansion, of the founding of towns, the planting of new industries, the building of new railroads, the opening of better navigation-routes, the enlistment of foreign capital; all the intelligence and enlightenment that attends a real industrial, commercial, and material quickening.

Beyond these social and economic factors a large count is set against the bureaucratic system for the conduct of administration. The suppression of personal liberty, of freedom of speech, the abuse of power by arbitrary officials, remorseless repression, ruthlessly carried out, racial oppression, frightful cruelty in the prisons and exile stations;--it is a terrible indictment that has been drawn. The close of the Japanese War opened a new “Smutnoe Vremya,” or time of trouble. Industrial wars, riots in Baku, uprisings in the Caucasus, seizure of cities by Social Democrats,--so went the disturbances throughout Russia, the white terror above grappling with the red terror beneath.

The situation which the forces of order were required to meet was extraordinary. The balance-wheel of the human mind, and all sense of proportion among classes of the people, seemed at times to be lost. Barbaric as the administration condemnations undoubtedly were, the individuals were not infrequently innocent only by curious standards. In a broad view one must confess that on both sides were rights and wrongs. The system, far more than individuals, was at fault. But while a system so linked to violence and oppression could not longer be suffered, the way out could not come through yielding to men in insurrection.

Salvation lay along the path that the Emperor opened. His rescript of October 17, 1905, proclaimed a National Duma.

The pregnant clauses in the summons to a national legislature were these:--

We direct the Government to carry out our inflexible will in the following manner:--

1. To grant the population the immutable foundation of civic liberty based on real inviolability of the person and freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association.

2. To call to participation in the Duma those classes of the population now completely deprived of electoral rights.

3. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can come into force without the approval of the State Duma.

The ebullition of sentiment that followed these decrees was extraordinary. All the bitterness and discontent that had weltered through the years of distress were metamorphosed into a glowing hope. Ambition and aspiration became a fervor. The delirium went electrically through all classes during the few following weeks of uncensored press and unfettered meetings. The educated were fed with every sort of essay upon what would be the result of the new order, and exhortation to keep spread the young wings for national ascension. Among the unlettered peasants, pictures circulated showing glorified cartoons of the risen Russia. One of the most widely distributed of these celebrated the Imperial Svoboda Manifesto. The genius of the Slav stood forth: one hand rested on a tablet marked “Zakon” (Law), the other unfurled a banner inscribed in blazing red letters, “Svoboda” (Liberty), below which followed freedom of speech, of forming associations, of holding meetings, of religion, the inviolability of the home, and amnesty for political prisoners. Peasants and workmen were grouped around, and above them stood an heroic figure representing the Duma which was to halo all national activity with law. The rising sun, illumining the Tauride Palace, cast its glow and glamour over the prophecy.

The ukase had gone forth to give the widest representation at the polls. The command was followed out in a system by which every class had its own deputies in the nominating colleges that elected the Duma members. Among the peasantry each _volost_ had two deputies; every thousand industrials had one, the nobility, the salaried clerks, the bourgeois in the cities, the Cossack stanitzas, the boards of trade, the universities, the Holy Synod, the aboriginal Buriat tribesmen,--each had special representation. Uninterfered with for the most part by officialdom, all Russia crowded to the polls, every man believing that his ideal was now, at last, on the eve of realization. The peasants who called for land, the workmen who wished for higher wages, the Intellectuals with their slogan of universal education, the submerged races with dreams of reborn nationalities, the ambitious with visions of power, the venal with hopes of plunder, each and all thought their hopes were to spring at once into the actual and the visual.

In such a fever-time the men to whom official service meant the slow toilsome improvement of conditions by self-sacrificing devotion to the routine of administration, who could offer as pre-nomination pledges only earnest study and conscientious action on the legal matters presented, were passed by in the hot aspiring canvass for delegates. Those who believed all things and promised all things, whose fervency of expectation fed the universal hope, whose preaching held that, the way once cleared, Russia could at a bound reach the plane to which other countries had so long and toilsomely struggled, those of fiery faith which would consume every obstacle--these were the men whom the people ratified and whom the nation sent to St. Petersburg for the first Duma.

It was a band of hot heads and eager hearts that assembled, echoing their constituents’ desires, crying for all things and at once. They were saturated with the history of the French Revolution, they felt confident that their coming meant the end of the old régime, and belief in their own power was the pledge of the future. Their first official act threw down the gauntlet to autocracy. In the reply to the Crown, passed during their first day’s session, the final paragraphs read:--

The most numerous part of the population, the hard-working peasants, impatiently await the satisfaction of their acute want of land; and the first Russian State Duma would be recreant in its duty were it to fail to establish a law to meet this primary want by resorting to the use of lands belonging to the State, the Crown, the Royal family, all monastic and state lands, also private landed property, on the principles of eminent domain.

The spiritual union of Russia’s different nationalities is possible only by meeting the needs of each one of them, and by preserving and developing their national characteristics. The Duma will try to satisfy these wants.

Sirs, the Duma expects of you full political amnesty, as the first pledge of mutual understanding and mutual agreement between the Czar and his people.

It was apparent that if these clauses did not contemplate the confiscation of private property, which was openly advocated by the peasant deputies, and the substitution of a “spiritual union” of Russia’s subsidiary peoples for the real hegemony, there was fair _prima-facie_ evidence for thinking that they did. While a general amnesty would render less than justice to a large number of citizens, it would cover as well the bomb-shell anarchists, whose imprisonment was as necessary to the protection of society as that of any other dangerous criminals. The tenor of these demands, the speeches of the deputies, and the avowed desires of their majority, brought matters to a crisis. Not alone the autocracy, but national unity, and the jurisdiction of the courts, were called openly and violently into question. When such a challenge is offered a government, it must answer or abdicate.

Unostentatiously, the Imperial Administration poured troops into St. Petersburg from Kronstadt and the northern garrisons. The governors at Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, and the big industrial centres were notified to concentrate their loyal regiments. The whole country was mapped out like a checker-board. It was now only a question of when the authorities would act.

On the night of July 8, the troops in St. Petersburg were called to arms. They marched with machine-like precision to appointed stations throughout the city. With the dawn every strategic point was held by the soldiery, and a battalion ringed about the deserted Duma hall. In the silence was read the imperial rescript. The first Duma had ceased to exist.

The dissolution of this national parliament had come as a stroke of lightning. The venerable representative Petrunkevitch told how he was awakened at five in the morning with the news that the city was under martial law and that soldiers with fixed bayonets were at the Duma doors. Hurried consultations were held with groups of colleagues, and finally the word was passed to meet at Viborg in Finland. At the little inn there, the pressing crowd of one hundred and sixty-nine fugitive deputies signed their manifesto. It called for the cessation of tax-payments, the refusal of conscription, and reclaimed the freedom of Russia. But the insurrection, the uprising in their support! Not a regiment came to assist them, not a city rallied to their call, not a Mir responded. For a few weeks the signers were free. Then the police took them, one by one.

Dully unprotesting, the public received the news of the dissolution of the Duma and the arrest of the deputies. The majority of Russians did not want disunion, did not want the overthrow of vested rights. Each wanted some specialty of his own. Yet here was the resultant of each constituency’s crystallized desires. The people had accepted the leadership of those who had held out great hopes, impotently. The Government had crushed the men whose power meant social and economic, as well as administrative, revolution. In the blow it had perforce shattered the dreams as well.

Humiliated by the contemptuous condemnation of their chosen representatives, bitterly disillusioned, the people at large stolidly acquiesced in the extinction.

The voting for the second Duma, which followed some months later, was almost perfunctory. Those who had chronically wished to agitate, and those put forward by the Administration in an effort to pack the membership, composed the bulk of the deputies. Moderates, hopeful of progress with order, stayed at home, disgusted with both sides. The result was a second violent, wrangling Duma, offending like the first, and in its turn ignominiously snuffed out.

The year 1907 saw universal disappointment, cynicism, and skepticism. In the literature, the lassitude of the nation was shown, and morbid despair reflected the thwarted hopes, the agonies, the confusion of the people. The bitterness in the _Lazarus_ of Andreyev, the decadence in the _Sanin_ of Artzybashev, mirrored the people’s mood, and the shadow of a dark destiny brooded over all. To fill the cup, the reaction, coldly triumphant, was able to bring the members of the first national parliament before the bar for high treason in signing the Viborg Manifesto.

In the stifling Hall of Justice in St. Petersburg, like a resurrection of the first Duma, sat the hundred and sixty-nine signers, grouped as of old by party affiliations. Each man was called upon to justify his actions. Many had signed the Viborg document in the belief that the people would rise in bloody rebellion, and they issued what was, to their fevered view, advice of moderation. One deputy after another stood erect to answer for his deeds. If the men had been carried from liberty into license, at least they had been fired by intense belief in themselves and in their mission. Impressive were the solemn declarations of those who expected nothing less than long imprisonment for speaking out, now, a defiance to the ruling power. It was currently rumored that should the former President of the Duma, Dolgoroukov, justify his action, his penalty was to be three years’ imprisonment; the others would serve one; while liberty was reported to be the bribe for any who would confess a fault. Yet almost to a man these old deputies rose to declare that they still stood by all that they had done.

“I did not care, and do not care if our action was unconstitutional. We found that we must rely,” said Nabokov, “on the highest law, the will of the people.”

Kakoshtin, of the Cadet Party, and a professor in Moscow University, declared: “Whatever fate awaits us, it will be nothing compared to the sufferings of our predecessors who have fallen in the fight for liberty.”

Three members of the “Group of Toil” declared that the first Duma would be an encouragement to the people to overthrow the present system.

Mourontzev, and Prince Dolgoroukov were there, leading members of the first Duma. Petrunkevitch ended his speech: “If you open for us the doors of the prison, we will quietly enter with the knowledge that we have fulfilled a duty to the Fatherland.”

Burning words these, but they waked not an echo. The Administration was in complete control of the situation. Repression was the order of the day, repression as widespread and efficient as in the days of Nicholas I; the autocracy, buttressed by an army which, however lacking in discipline and supposedly honeycombed by disaffection, nevertheless rallied still to the command and service of the master.

At this time there was issued the call for a third Duma. As Prime Minister sat cold Stolypin, whose reputation as a governor-general was the reverse of liberal. He had risen by virtue of rigid efficiency. His best friends did not know his beliefs. He had dissolved both the first and second assemblies, and had done his best to pack the third. “I want a Duma that will work, not talk,” he declared.

The murmurers said that the Russian Parliament had become a farce; that the administrative officers were following to the best of their ability instructions from St. Petersburg to deliver a roster of safe men; that those who had agitated unwisely were being removed from the likelihood of candidature; that the Senate, with its membership of retired officials, had so construed each provision of the election law that the unquiet classes were as far as possible disfranchised; that every influence was being used to make the third a “dummy Duma,” hopelessly manipulated into the reactionary camp.

Throughout this time of shattered ideals and discouragement, a very small band of real believers still held high the torch of faith. Most prominent among them was Alexander Goutchkov, he who among the Moscow Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets” of the earlier times) had in a critical Polish debate of the party spoken and voted alone for a united Russia.

When at length the third Duma had assembled, the so-called Octobrists or Moderates, who had a small plurality, prepared a reply to the Speech from the Throne. Very respectful it was, with no demand for general amnesty or suggestions of confiscation or national devolution. It read in part:--

We wish to devote all our ability, knowledge, and experience to strengthening the form of government which was given new life by the Imperial will; to pacify the Fatherland, to assure respect for the laws, to be a buttress for the greatness and power of indivisible Russia.

Unexceptionable, this, to the higher powers, save that in the preamble in the original draft, the Czar’s historic title of “Autocrat” had not been given him. A debate followed, and brought about the declarations which defined the parties of the third Duma. Bishop Mitrophane, of the Right, or reactionary party, rose. He said in the name of his group that the Address to the Throne must contain the phrase “Autocrat of all the Russias.” Lawyer Plevako seconded, threatening to secede if the proper title were not incorporated. Paul Milyoukov spoke hotly for the opposing Cadets, asking whether the country was or was not under a constitution. He declared the new election law to be contrary to the original ukase and an act of force. Others of the Left, among them orator Maklakov of the Cadets, declaimed against the election law by which this Duma was constituted. They were not politic, these spokesmen, but harsh and dogmatic, yielding none of the courtier-respect that makes up for so much absence of real yielding. For the Octobrists, Alexander Goutchkov led the debate. His speech revealed that they operated, not with the bludgeon, but with the Damascus blade. They were of flexible obstinacy and opportunism, stirring up no sleeping dogs, bending to rise again. Goutchkov slipped adroitly into his speech the disputed word constitution, thus: “We do not believe that the Czar’s power has been diminished. The Emperor has become free, for the Constitution has delivered him from court camarillas and the hierarchy of chinovniks.” Thanks largely to his tact, the Octo brists won. The Address, without “Autocrat,” was passed by a vote of two to one. But it passed at the cost of self-separation by the right wing of the reactionaries, who withdrew.

The answer of the Administration came sharply from Prime Minister Stolypin:--

The manifesto of imperial power has borne witness at all times to the people that the autocratic power, created by history and the free will of the monarch, constitutes the most precious benefit of the political state of Russia; for it is this power and this free will that are alone capable, as the tutelary source of existing constitutions, of saving Russia in times of trouble, of guaranteeing the state from the dangers that threaten it, and of bringing back the country to the way of order and historic truth.

He called upon the Chamber to incorporate the recognition of the “Autocracy.”

A hundred members protested. Many of the Cadets walked out. To the Octobrists, barely a quorum, fell the humiliating duty of recalling their own address and of inserting, despite the scorn, the fateful word. So shaken was the group itself by the conflict that of its one hundred and sixty members but ninety-five united in the caucus that elected officers and committee members. Alexander Goutchkov was chosen chairman, Baron Meyendorf, Priest Bjeloussov, and Radsjauko, officers. Among the heads of committees were Prince Wollanski, and Peasant Kusovkov. In spite of the stigma of reaction popularly imposed upon them, these were not unrepresentative men.

The distracted Duma got slowly under way, and the Prime Minister brought before them his proposed policy of administration.

M. Stolypin’s address to the Duma, November 16, 1907, stated that:--

1. The destructive movements of the party of the extreme Left have resulted in brigandage and anarchy. Order will be the first duty of the Government.

2. Agrarian relief is the first necessity, and this by a system of small proprietors.

3. Local self-government and administrative reforms will be formulated and presented to the Duma.

Business got centred on these practical subjects. Discussions as to whether or not there was an autocracy gave place to famine-relief measures and railway-rate studies. The absenting delegates of the Left and Right, who had retreated to their tents in the wrangle over the Czar’s titles, and had left the forlorn little band of constructive Octobrists to carry on the work of legislation, now returned. The proceedings began to take parliamentary form.

The Budget came on, the Ministers of the Government presenting their projects for discussion. In the heat of debate, the Minister of Finance, M. Kakovtsev, exclaimed, “Thank God, we have no parliament yet!” The fact that an Imperial Minister was presenting his budget to an elected assembly showed the reality, but the war on names rose up afresh. The Duma officially declared the Minister’s expression unfortunate. He threatened to resign unless the house apologized. The Left again exploded in outcries, called out that the Duma was a farce, threw in their votes as more fuel for the flame of discord, and deserted the hall when they were in the minority. Still the little band of moderates chose the self-abnegating, unspectacular part, and gave the apology that avoided a crisis.

But now came up a matter wherein the dispute was not over a name or a title, but a reality. The Government, upheld by the Czar, the Court, and much public sympathy, proposed a programme for a new navy. It called for the immediate allocation of one hundred and eleven million roubles, and the expenditure in ten years, of over a billion roubles. In the state of the country this entailed a fearful burden, perhaps the loss of the gold standard. The outwardly supine members, in rows like grenadiers, voted against the project. By 194 to 78 it was lost.

The Minister of Finance shortly afterwards undertook to issue railway bonds without the Duma’s consent. With a rebuke, for which this time no apology was asked or given, his estimate was cut down by one rouble, and voted. The Amur Railway was authorized, though three hundred million roubles are its prospective toll. The sole remaining Pacific port of Russia, Vladivostok, is thereby linked with the Irkutsk and Trans-Baikal districts of Siberia, and so doubly insured against an eastern enemy.

After a lengthy session the third Duma adjourned, but not by violence. It could show as results two hundred bills passed, a budget thoroughly scrutinized and ratified, and much faithful work in committee. More important still, the Parliament, by forbearance and patience, had made itself a part of the machinery of government, and had shown that a national legislature did not mean expropriation, and a partitioned Russia.

At the end, fiery Maklakov of the Cadets, he who early in the session had cried out that all was a farce, admitted that “the third Duma has lost none of its rights, it is systematically extending them.” All honor to those whose self-suppression and patience won.

The thin edge of the wedge had been driven in under absolutism by the third Duma, but little could one foresee that a half-dozen quiet blows would, during the fourth Duma’s session, bring autocracy to the greatest crisis it has encountered since it decreed a legislature. The heart of the situation lies in a naval bill submitting to the Duma matters which the Constitution reserves to the control of the Emperor. Strangely, too, the Czar is himself the abettor, if not the originator, of the supplanting.

In May, 1906, the Czar decided to create the “Naval General Staff.” One hundred thousand roubles a year were needed, and the money must be sought of the Duma. The first two assemblies being so violent, the measure lay in abeyance, to the great injury of the service. Since the regeneration of the navy was one of the measures made painfully necessary by the Japanese War, M. Stolypin had a bill drafted, in three clauses: one ratifying the creation of the “Naval General Staff,” a second furnishing an annual sum for its operation, a third supplying a fund for contingencies. No feature of the creation, save the financial aspect, came at all within the legal jurisdiction of the Duma. Yet the Premier had the organization itself brought before the Assembly.

The deputies criticised the institution, modified it, sliced the estimates. Assuming the judicial functions of a court of last appeal, they voted the money and passed the bill, which M. Stolypin then submitted to the upper chamber. In view of the overstepping of domain, the bill was, after a lucid exposition of the law by the ex-Controller-General, thrown out.

The matter was next submitted to the Czar himself, who authorized its reintroduction in the Duma. A second time the measure was passed and sent to the Council. M. Durnovo, ex-Minister, ablest of the Conservatives, and candidate for the Premiership, made a notable speech. He proved clearly the trespass upon the rights reserved to the Crown, showed that such precedents would build up an artificial claim which could not later be combated, while the allowance of participation in one instance gave a warrant for demanding interference in any and every proposal. The bill was a blow at the very heart of monarchical government, and a degree of democracy not allowed even in republican France. But, defiantly, M. Stolypin held his ground. The anomaly was presented of Conservatives decrying the Premier for undermining the dynasty, with the Emperor himself supporting the culprit. Thus has the former government minority been converted into a majority,--the measure passed by the small margin of twelve.

The reactionaries have bitter feud with this Premier. He has, it is allowed, so enlarged the functions of the deputies by handing over to them, one after another, the vital prerogatives of the autocracy, that no later action can ever disestablish the Duma. The Empire is now governed through a unified cabinet; the important prerogative of appointing the governors-general has been exercised by the Premier, rather than by the Czar, since June 16, 1906. Russia has marched far on its upward way.

Great, however, is the task ahead. Of all that the Duma can achieve the country has supreme need. The agrarian question calls aloud for solution, and the peasants’ future depends on land-relief. The Emperor has given instructions for the sale of most of the Crown domains and those of the Imperial Family. The nobles are being encouraged to sell to the tenants, on notes guaranteed by the Imperial land bank. Firm and able hands must guide this improvement, promoting the division of estates left to run wild, but avoiding the pitfalls of threatened property-rights.

Individual enterprise must be awakened, which will in the end bring about more scientific rotation and intensive farming. The old system leaves fallow thirty-three per cent of the arable land--an area equal to the whole ploughed acreage of the United States. In western Europe but seven per cent is fallow, and the value of the harvest per acre in Russia is less than a third that of Germany. The policy adopted in the Agrarian Law of November 9, 1906, for the gradual breaking-up of the communistic Mirs, and the division of the common lands, at the villagers’ option, into freehold plots, is a wise one. In 1907, the year following the law’s promulgation, 2617 peasants, in the government of Ekaterinoslav had become individual proprietors. Under the Land Act of 1909 one million farms had been taken up for private ownership in the first six months of the law’s operation.

Emigration to the vast untilled fields of Siberia should be carried on with all the efficiency of which the Government is capable. That this is in progress, the figure of four hundred and ninety-one thousand emigrants for the first seven months of 1908 attests. Fifty-nine thousand homeseekers were sent by villages which wished to emigrate thither _en masse_. But care and providence must follow the movement, and insure that the settlers are equipped with the means for safe and permanent establishment.

The race-question calls also for a righteous solution. The future must bring the repeal of the old bureaucratic laws of Jewish exclusion, and end the vicious circle of oppression and terrorism against this much wronged people. The chaotic finances of the Empire must be regulated by years of patient work, such as that of the last Duma, through whose agency there is now, for the first time in twenty-two years, a budget surplus.

The Duma members, to whom these all-important tasks fall, must plough the fields in all their armor. The autocracy is not their greatest enemy. The history of parliamentary government demonstrates again and again that in an ordered community authority gradually reverts to the national representative assembly. Little by little power slips away from the throne. In England, in 1686, the reign of James II could show Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes; yet five years later the Parliament was in full and permanent control of the government.

The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor of true representative government there must come a critical period when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution?

One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless, for every indication shows that the people would not support them or their policies.

Even Moscow, their former stronghold, fell away in the 1909 elections. There is throughout the country an undercurrent of fierce demand for an immediate millennium, with Liberty as the guiding grace and some particular party as its escort. A song that has become almost an anthem, “Spurn with us that ancient tyrant,” chanted softly by the school-boys to the tune of the _Marseillaise_,--this tells the tale of what is in the air, and in the blood of the people. The most poorly-suppressed desire is insatiate to hack away with one blow the abuses that have, through the centuries, rooted themselves deep in Russian society. The experience of the various revolutionary and terrorist movements proves that their votaries are capable of daring any death for their creeds, and of swimming to their imaged goal in a sea of blood. Let the conservative Octobrist group once succeed in concentrating power in the Duma, and then let a free election substitute for them such men as were in the first Duma, and the Russian Revolution has become a fact.

It is a commonplace to compare the situation with that of France in 1790. There is, however, one fundamental difference. France possessed a numerous and economically powerful bourgeoisie, from whom political rights had been withheld. This class included many strong men moved to a unity of political desire. They were able in the first place to work up into a place of dominance. After the interval of supplanting terrorism, they retook by their own efforts the power which, save for the periods of despotic militarism, they have since maintained. In Russia the conservative middle-class is numerically very weak, and its representatives are unable to seize and hold control themselves. They possess it now only precariously, by the external propping of weakening absolutism. Will Russia’s Octobrists, after performing the function of filching power from the autocracy, meet, at the hands of a new Robespierre, the fate of the high-idealed Gironde?

One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers, has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a political and social situation is so desperate that all other means must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance. The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly accepted elsewhere--such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come within “forty _sagenes_” of the custom-house inquisition which faces every American citizen on his return home.

It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe fifty years ago--abuses common to a certain stage of civilization, and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states, anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.

In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort.

Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of _nietchevo_ and with all their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred and forty millions.

Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure way of evolution.

VIII

THE STORY OF THE HORDES

Among people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols, it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend, the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country except Japan.

That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic, from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu--the Huns; from the documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.

The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they grow steadily clearer and more colossal.

In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River. Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the “barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese nation.

Through fifteen hundred years the descendants of the invaders wrought out a dimly comprehended civilization on the banks of the Hoang-ho. Behind the imposing national legend, hallowed by the mist of centuries and focused by images of their five Hero Kings, one may see the fact of strong, brave rulers striving for their people’s advance. A real statesman was the original of the demigod Shinnung, “holy husbandman,” the introducer of agriculture, in whose honor every spring a furrow is ploughed in the soil of his temple courtyard by the Emperor of China. A father in the flesh was that “Nest-builder” who watched the birds construct their homes, and on that model taught his people to make the wattled and plastered huts one sees to-day. The mystic queller of disastrous inundations, Ta-yu, founder of the house of Hia, was the first hydraulic engineer, the dykes of whose successors embank the treacherous Yellow River. He it was who hung at his door a bell which any of his subjects might ring, to obtain immediate attention, and who would leave his rice to answer a call to secure justice. Kie likewise wears human lineaments, he who made a mountain of meat and a tank of wine, and then, to please a frail companion, had his courtiers eat and drink of them on all fours like cows. There is an historic background to the rising against the tyrant under Shang, who later offered himself as a human sacrifice for rain in time of famine, and a kindred note in the story of Chou-siu, sold to misfortunes by a woman whom he loved and immolating himself in his royal robes when the rebellious vassals were closing in around him.

As the years pass, the histories become clearer and more direct, and the legendary aspect of exploits falls away. The Commentaries of Confucius deal with events as tangible and exact as Luther’s Reformation: they give the records of kings, and their daily doings two thousand years before our era.

In 1122 B.C., with Wu-wang of the dynasty of Chu, the Chinese nation emerged as a civilized state. It was organized on a feudal system, not dissimilar to that built up by Japan’s powerful Daimios. Under this single dynasty the Celestial Kingdom began a period of 873 years of development, marked by the writings of the great sages. Lao-tse, founder of the Taoist religion, with its watchword of “Tao” (reason), but its quick degeneracy to forms and idol-worship, was the first of the Chinese philosophers in point of time. He was at the zenith of his repute around 530 B.C. He had a young disciple struggling through poverty to an education, “Master Kung,” known to us under the Latinized nomenclature of Jesuit missionaries as Confucius.

The youth eagerly conned and meditated upon Lao-tse’s abstract speculations; but, unsatisfied, he began the studies and compilations from the ancients which to this day constitute the foundations of Chinese literature, etiquette, religion, ceremonial, and policy of government.

Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,--as witness his “Do not unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”--but his life brought no great new message.

“I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself.

Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.

In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.

In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern frontier of Mongol dominion.

Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”

This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece. From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them, nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord, I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”

All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”

Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.

By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.

But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,” appears again and again in the history.

At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word China--Ts’in.

In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.

“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies. Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned. The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination, of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the office-holders as masters.’”

The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed, themselves, over the same fires.

But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes, and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214 B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea to Tibet.

The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang, who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.

“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”

“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.

The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.

At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating _samshu_. These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were carrying on an equivalent.

More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly. In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.

In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our frontiers.”

In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China. Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D., a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100 A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two centuries they temporarily disappear from history.

The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia. Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were, about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.

“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.

The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the vacated places of what is now Austria.

Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons, and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of the World,”--Attila.

A profound politician, he alternately cajoled and threatened the peoples whose conquest he undertook; a true barbarian, no food save flesh and milk passed his lips. He and his men worshiped the mysteriously discovered scimitar of Mars, and from Persia to Gaul, from Finland to the walls of Constantinople, his armies ranged. Ambassadors went from his Court to China. The great battle of Chalons, in which, aided by the Goths, the dwindling forces of Rome’s Western Empire won their last victory, alone preserved Europe from his yoke. His descendants, mixing with succeeding conquerors, have remained until this day in the land that is called, after their dreaded name, Hungary.

Back to the history of Sz-ma Ts’ien one must return for the next harvest of Mongolia’s dragon-teeth. The Tung-hu, whose descendants are now the skin-clad Tunguses that live far to the north, even up to the Arctic Ocean, came down between 309 and 439 A.D. upon Manchuria. This occupation separated China from Corea, which, thus isolated, preserved for centuries the old Han dialect. The Tung-hu conquerors established a great kingdom extending from the Japan Sea to Turkestan. From 380 to 580 they ruled the northern kingdom of China proper. The leading place among those who composed their empire was held by the tribe of Juju, or Geougen, whose descendants are now the Finns. Subject to the Juju was a Mongol clan descended from the old southern Hiung-nu, who lived hard-by Mount Altai. They were blacksmiths and armorers for the Tung-hu army, and were called Turks. Their crescent power gradually supplanted that of their masters.