The shepherds have had full control of the flock. The guardians have had no interference with the education of their wards.
If after so many hundreds of years the mass of the Russian people are so steeped in ignorance and superstition that they are unfit to exercise the common rights of manhood, that fact, if it be fact, damns the Russian aristocracy with the deep guilt of having debased the nation committed to its care and guidance.
No substantial reform has ever been conceded within a state governed by king or aristocracy until the blood of sacrifice has first been shed.
Spain would grant no concessions to those who claimed freedom of conscience in the Netherlands, until years of warfare had drenched the soil of Holland with the blood of heroes, who fought and died for those principles which we carelessly and unappreciatively enjoy today.
France would loosen none of the chains which galled the peasant, until that peasant rose in his desperation and paid with his life for the liberty his descendants inherit. The king was deaf to all prayers.
The aristocracy drove from power with insults and persecution every enlightened minister who proposed to better the condition of the common people by conceding moderate reforms. It was only when the desperation of despair roused the people to a furious attack upon time-honored abuses and vested wrongs of every conceivable kind, that “privilege” would harken to reason, and Right could find a place on the statute-book.
In England the story has been the same. In the long procession of the ages in which the common people have wrung, one by one, from the grip of aristocracy those liberties upon which we now pride ourselves, the price of blood has been always demanded, and invariably paid. Never has king or aristocrat conceded a single demand of the reformers until those reformers had either won it in battle or had made such a demonstration as struck fear into the hearts of the ruling class.
In Russia precisely the same state of affairs exists, and if ever liberal institutions are to take the place of grand ducal tyranny and class-rule in that empire the soil will once more drink the blood of sacrifice. It was so in the beginning, is now, and ever will be, perhaps, for human nature is the same “yesterday, today and forever.”
The man who believes that the autocratic class in Russia will give up its advantages without a fight is a superficial student of history, just as the man who believes that the dominating trusts and corporations in these United States can be made, by moral suasion, to turn loose, is an idle dreamer who knows nothing of the greed of class-rule. No matter under what name it exploits the people, or under what form it exerts its power, or under what particular system of legislation it usurps control and veils its rascalities, to make it turn loose you must beat it in battle or make it afraid.