But in spite of all his bravery and his self-sacrifice this heroic priest was not without his traducers. A short time after his death a certain missionary named Dr. Hyde made scurrilous charges against him which were answered by that great writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, in a letter that has become one of the classics of English literature, and in which it was predicted that Father Damien would be made a saint by the Church of Rome, as he is indeed a saint in the bravery and purity of his life and his deeds.
CHAPTER XXVII
CATHERINE BRESHKOVSKY
In the year 1844 in Russia was born one of the most remarkable women of modern times. Her full name is Ekaterina Constantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya, but in America she is called Catherine Breshkovsky, and as such she will be known in these pages. Both her father and her mother were of noble birth, and when she was a little girl her father had a large estate on which hundreds of serfs were held in bondage.
While the negroes in the United States were kept in slavery, the peasants in Russia were in almost as bad a plight. They lived on the estates of the great nobles and formed a part of the nobles' property. Toiling from dawn until far into the night with frequent floggings and browbeatings from their masters they bore the burdens of the Russian government that gave them nothing in return. While the noblemen feasted on the fruits of the peasants' toil, the peasants themselves starved to death. When war came it was the peasants who furnished the armies while the nobles themselves seldom went to the front but remained behind the lines in safety.
When Catherine was a little girl she saw many instances of injustice and oppression, although the serfs on her father's estate were treated far better than many others. She did not know why she herself had fine clothes and delicate food, when the children of her father's servants were ragged and dirty, and often had just enough to eat to keep them from starving. She used to ask her parents what was the reason that they had no work to perform, while others had to get up when the stars were still shining and labor until long after the sun had set at night. And why the ones who did not work were so much better off than the others who did. And before she was eight years old, she had formed the habit of giving away her own possessions to the children of the serfs, who never had the pretty things with which she was surfeited.
Before she was nine, Catherine, we are told, had read a long history of Russia in nine large volumes, and when she was a girl of sixteen she had made an especial study of the French Revolution and the causes that led up to it.
The Crimean war came, and soldiers went to the front in large numbers. They were all taken from the families of the serfs, and while a certain number of the noblemen went to the war as officers of the Russian army, many others stayed at home safely, not being compelled to fight for their country as the peasants were. And the injustice of the system was very evident to the young girl, who even then was forming the idea of devoting her life to aiding the suffering and oppressed people who surrounded her.
About the time that the Civil War began in the United States a great change came over the peasantry in Russia, but it was a change that seemed to do them little good. The Russian Czar issued a proclamation in 1861 in which he declared that all serfs in his dominions were at liberty, and if they chose could leave the estates of their former masters and seek work where they wished.