“I don’t agree with you,” said the Cadet. “The same argument might have been used by an Intendant at the beginning of the French Revolution with regard to the Tiers État. They no doubt said then that the Tiers État represented nothing, because it had not been allowed to represent anything up to that moment. The same thing is true here. The Tiers État has been suppressed politically, and owing to this suppression it has burst out. It is far bigger than you think, because all your minor mandarins and some of your major mandarins belong to it and form part of it. Only yesterday I heard a reactionary complaining bitterly that all the officials in St. Petersburg sympathised with the Cadets, which was scandalous considering that they received Government wages. Besides this, the Cadets include all the intellect of the country and all the most intelligent men. They have partisans drawn from every class.”
“I disagree with you,” said the man who belonged to no Party to the ex-official, “on different grounds. I believe the Cadets to be just as Russian as you are, in the sense of being different from mere Westerners. The other day a charming old Cadet gentleman whom I know had some friends to dinner. They began playing windt at nine o’clock in the evening and they went on playing until eleven o’clock the next morning without stopping. In what other country would that happen? Certainly not in England or in France.”
“Grattez le Cadet et vous trouverez le Russe,” answered the ex-official. “Perhaps if you scratch the Japanese you will get at the Chinaman.”
“Surely not,” said the man who belonged to no Party; “but apart from this the antagonism between officialdom and the Tiers État is not a thing exclusively Russian. It has happened in every country. The end of the struggle is that officialdom or lawlessness is put under control. That is what is happening here. Peter the Great was the first Cadet, only he was self-sufficient and had need of no Party.”
St. Petersburg, June 9th.
There is a current of opinion which is hostile to the Duma, and I have lately had the opportunity of seeing manifestations of it. The views of the Ministry have now been made plain to us and need no comment; but one of the ideas which form the basis of their attitude and their action is suggestive, namely, that Count Witte is entirely responsible for the present state of things, in not having introduced universal suffrage, which, if it had been applied during the elections, say the Ministers, would have produced a majority in the Duma infinitely less Radical than the present one. I cannot help feeling slightly amused when I hear this catchword solemnly repeated, because when I was here before the elections at Christmas time, the same people who repeat it used equally solemnly to explain to me then the utter impossibility and the terrible danger of universal suffrage. Personally, I am convinced that whatever the system of suffrage had been, the majority would have been Radical, because the majority of the country is Radical. That is to say, there is in the country a large majority of discontented people. Nobody, I think, can refute this proposition. It was confirmed to me the other day by an intelligent Conservative. When I say Conservative, I mean that he belongs to none of the Liberal parties. He explained his point of view to me thus: “I dislike the Cadets,” he said; “they inspire me with a profound antipathy; I think they have played a double game in their dealings with the Left; I think they drew a line to the Right, and none to the Left; that they promised more than they could give. They said more in their propaganda than they now say in the Duma. On the other hand, we have nothing better than them. Besides them we have only the Government, which is not worth mentioning, and the Extreme Left, which is demented. Again, I think they really do contain the most intelligent men we have got in Russia now—the best brains, the best workers, and the best organisers—and I could only hope for a peaceful issue if the Emperor were to support them. I consider them the sole bulwark against Anarchy.”
I asked him what he thought of their attitude towards the land question.
“I don’t think the land question can be settled by any one project,” he answered, “because the conditions are so different in various parts of Russia. The Cadets talk of local committees and of the necessity of expropriation in principle. I think what the peasants want is capital, not land. When the agitation began my peasants came to me and asked for five thousand dessiatines. I offered them one thousand, and then they found that five hundred was all they could manage to cultivate. I think, of course, that all the land which is rented should be expropriated, and I think the folly of the Government in ignoring the question of the land rented to the peasants was supreme. The Government thinks it can remedy the present evils by drastic means, but they leave the cause of the evils untouched, which is this: there is a mass of discontented people in Russia, and as long as they remain discontented the disorder will continue. There are some things which could be done at once to render the peasants less discontented. They can be given rights if they cannot be given land. They are now at the mercy of the local magistrate.”
The net result of this man’s opinion was that it is a choice of evils, and the Cadets are the lesser evil. Yesterday I had a talk with a man who bitterly attacked the Cadets and all their ways. He was a member of the Duma and belongs to the Left. He spoke in this strain: “The Cadets insist on acting legally. It is sheer cowardice. In times of revolution the only effective action is illegal action. The Cadets have no right to call themselves the Party of the freedom of the people. They are nothing but Moderate Liberals.”
“But what do you think they ought to have done?” I asked. “When the Government refuses to consider our Bills,” he answered, “except according to a process and after a space of time which they determine, we ought to pass them in defiance of the Ministry and let them dissolve us.”