"Not the slightest. On the contrary, whoever falls under the suspicion of unconditional approval of the present system may be morally destroyed at any time."
"What will then be the end?"
"That the terror from above will awaken the terror from below, that peasant revolts will break out—even now the police must be augmented in the interior—and assassination will increase."
"And is there no possibility of organizing the revolution so that it shall not rage senselessly?"
"Impossible. Our rural nobleman is, to be sure, not a junker; but the strength of the régime consists in the exclusion of any understanding between the land-owners and the peasants because of the social and intellectual chasm between them."
"Your excellency, I remember a saying of Strousberg's, who was a good business man, 'There is nowhere a hole where there once was land.' One learns to doubt that here in Russia. There is not one with whom I have spoken who would fail to paint the future of this country in the darkest colors. Can there be no change of the fatal policy that is ruining the country?"
"Not before a great general catastrophe. When we shall be compelled, for the first time, partly to repudiate our debts—and that may happen sooner than we now believe—on that day, being no longer able to pay our old debts with new ones—for we shall no longer be able to conceal our internal bankruptcy from foreign countries and from the Emperor—steps will be taken, perhaps, towards a general convention. No sooner."
"Is there no mistake possible here?"
"Martin Luther hesitated as long as he had not seen the pope, no longer after that. Whoever, like myself, has known the state kitchen for the last twenty-five years, doubts no longer. The autocracy is not equal to the problems of a modern great power, and it would be against all historical precedents to assume that it would voluntarily yield without external pressure to a constitutional form of government."