"Certainly; even if it were not Pobydonostzev's opinion. For brutality alone certainly will not do. We must have knowledge of the subject and strength of will."
"Then the future must look very black to your excellency, if you await salvation from a new and better-trained czar. At present there is not even a prospect of a successor to the throne."
"It looks black enough. I have no hope at all. For what is hope to others is to me new ground for sorrow. We shall be defeated in Asia. We shall have a financial crash—i. e., our long-existent bankruptcy can no longer be veiled by juggling with the budget; and then we shall have a repetition of the old game of revolutions and constitutions. Some Western ideas on constitution-making will be imported and will not work. There will come a reaction, and the hand of every man will be against every other...."
"Then your excellency is opposed to the freedom of the press?"
"God forbid! A Conservative régime is far from being a police régime. We must have a public opinion and a respectable press, and a press without freedom cannot be respectable. A press which is under strict laws but not under police tyranny, and an honorable government, can both be brought about more easily under an absolute monarchy than under parliamentary rule; but there will be no question of all this."
"I find hardly any essential difference between the ideas your excellency represents and those I have been hearing for months in Russia."
"You cannot wonder at that. If you should ask me whether the snow out-of-doors is white or green, I also, as a Conservative, can only answer that it is white. We are in a bad way; our peasantry is starving, our thinking class is in despair, our finances are ravaged. Yet I believe that far more evil days are before us, and I thank God that I am an old man who has seen the worst."
So ended my interview with the Conservative, whom I had sought out for the correction of the Radical views I had heard. In the evening I had to make a report to my friends, who had waited it in suspense. My information created an immense sensation. Something entirely different from the interview had been expected, and there was astonishment at hearing views as bitter as any one present could have formulated. Had he permitted me to publish the conversation with his name?
"The conversation, but not his name," I answered.
A general "Aha!" went up from all present.