“The Emperor received me with much heartiness. And at the first glance, seeing him to be a splendid gentleman, with no airs of pretension and as artless as any man I ever saw, it seemed to me that we were old friends from the start.”
Doctor Talmage did not visit the Russian prisons which he defended; did not go to Siberia, which he compared to Italy; did not make any investigations of peasant-life; did not go among the working classes; did not talk with Tolstoy, nor any man of the dissatisfied elements. In fact, Talmage declares, in effect, that nobody was dissatisfied.
Listen to Doctor Talmage, Page 422:
“He who charges cruelty on the imperial family and the nobility of Russia, belies men and women as gracious and benignant as ever breathed oxygen.”
Shades of von Plehve!
When we read such lines as the above and recall how that gracious and benignant nobility have drenched Russia with blood of peasants, Jews, city workingmen, republican agitators—littering the streets with ghastly heaps of murdered men and women and children—we may well stand amazed at the success with which the wool was pulled over the eyes of the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.
“There are no kinder people on earth than the Russians, and to most of them cruelty is an impossibility.”
“Dr. Talmage did not go to Siberia, which he compared to Italy.”