And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms the agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in the same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago; whose land from generation to generation dwindles by partition, while the population increases. How and when is this question going to be solved? It can only be solved by the education of the peasants themselves; but the question is what can be done to gain time and to make this education possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too pessimistic. I do not know. I only feel that the whole revolutionary movement is beyond all forces of control, and that no measures in the world can put it back now; whether it could by wisdom be led into safe channels is another question. Such a thing has seldom been seen in the history of the world, and it is, after all, only out of the past that we make the future.
To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-tree, dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy and a huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian peasants dance to each other, and separately, of course, like Highlanders when they dance a reel or a schottische. It was gay and yet rather melancholy; there were so many cripples, and it reminded me a little of the Christmas feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters from a Dead House.”
January 18th.
To-day I heard a characteristic story. A student told it to me. A peasant was looking at a rich man’s house in one of the streets of Moscow. An agitator went up to him and said: “Think of the rich man living in that great house, and think of your miserable position.”
“Yes,” said the peasant cheerfully, “it’s a big house; he’s a proper Barine.”
“But,” said the agitator, much irritated, “it’s most unjust that he should live in such a big house and that you should live in a small house. You should turn him out of it.”
“How could that be?” answered the peasant. “He is used to being rich. All his life he has lived in plenty. What would he do in poverty? We are used to poverty, and we must have pity on those who are not used to it.”
The agitator then gave the peasant up and went away in disgust.
January 20th.
I arrived in St. Petersburg this morning. Yesterday a Russian friend of mine discussed with me my ideas on the “Intelligenzia” and their revolutionary sympathies which I had embodied in a letter to the Morning Post. My friend said that I had committed a gross injustice to the Russian “Intelligenzia,” and that my letter, by reflecting the opinion of Englishmen who had spent but a short time in Russia, and judged everything from the point of view of a country where political liberty had long since been an established fact, gave a wrong impression. There is some truth in this, no doubt. It is difficult here to keep a cool head and not to be swayed by circumambient influence. The danger does not lie in being influenced by those who immediately surround one, but rather in being influenced inversely by their opinions. I mean one has only to talk to a revolutionary or to a conservative long enough, at the present moment, to be convinced that his adversary is right. I still hold, however, to what I wrote about the unfairness and exaggerations of the sympathisers with the revolution among the “Intelligenzia.” I think they are incapable of looking at the matter impartially, and no wonder. Moreover, the Government past and present is responsible for their frame of mind. Again, I still hold to what I said, that the “Intelligenzia” have not produced a great man; but instead of retracting what I said, I will, as I said I would do, after the oriental fashion, having stated all that there was to be said against them, try and set forth all that is to be said in favour of the “Intelligenzia.”