Philistia | Page 6

these constant attacks, and you only rouse the minds of the
oligarchy against you by your importunity. Bloodshed will avail us
nothing; the world cannot be regenerated by a baptism like that. Every
peasant won over, every student enrolled, every mother engaged to feed
her little ones on the gospel of Socialism together with her own milk, is
worth a thousand times more to us and to the people than a dead Czar.
If your friends had really blown him up, what then? You would have
had another Czar, and another Third Section, and another reign of terror,
and another raid and massacre; and we should have lost twenty good
men from our poor little side for ever. We must not waste the salt of the
earth in that reckless fashion. Besides, I don't like this dynamite. It's a
bad argument, it smacks too much of the old royal and repressive
method. You know the motto Louis Quatorze used to cast on his bronze

cannon--"Ultima ratio regum." Well, we Socialists ought to be able to
find better logic for our opponents than that, oughtn't we?'
'But in Russia,' cried the bearded man hotly, 'in poor stricken-down
groaning Russia, what other argument have they left us? Are we to be
hunted to death without real law or trial, tortured into sham confessions,
deluded with mock pardons, arraigned before hypocritical tribunals,
ensnared by all the chicanery, and lying, and treachery, and ferreting of
the false bureaucracy, with its spies, and its bloodhounds, and its
knout-bearing police-agents; and then are we not to make war the only
way we can--open war, mind you, with fair declaration, and due
formalities, and proper warning beforehand--against the irresponsible
autocrat and his wire-pulled office-puppets who kill us off mercilessly?
You are too hard upon us, Herr Schurz; even you yourself have no
sympathy at all for unhappy Russia.'
The old man looked up at him tenderly and regretfully. 'My poor
Borodinsky,' he said in a gentle tremulous voice, 'I have indeed
sympathy and pity in abundance for you. I do not blame you; you will
have enough and to spare to do that, even here in free England; I would
not say a harsh word against you or your terrible methods for all the
world. You have been hard-driven, and you stand at bay like tigers. But
I think you are going to work the wrong way, not using your energies
to the best possible advantage for the proletariate. What we have really
got to do is to gain over every man, woman, and child of the
working-classes individually, and to array on our side all the learning
and intellect and economical science of the thinking classes
individually; and then we can present such a grand united front to the
banded monopolists that for very shame they will not dare to gainsay us.
Indeed, if it comes to that, we can leave them quietly alone, till for pure
hunger they will come and beg our assistance. When we have enticed
away all the workmen from their masters to our co-operative factories,
the masters may keep their rusty empty mills and looms and engines to
themselves as long as they like, but they must come to us in the end,
and ask us to give them the bread they used to refuse us. For my part, I
would kill no man and rob no man; but I would let no man kill or rob
another either.'

'And how about Alexander Nicolaiovitch, then?' persisted the Russian,
eagerly. 'Has he killed none in his loathsome prisons and in his Siberian
quicksilver mines? Has he robbed none of their own hardly got
earnings by his poisoned vodki and his autocratically imposed taxes
and imposts? Who gave him an absolute hereditary right to put us to
death, to throw us in prison, to take our money from us against our will
and without our leave, to treat us as if we existed, body and soul, and
wives and children, only as chattels for the greater glory of his own
orthodox imperial majesty? If we may justly slay the highway robber
who meets us, arms in hand, in the outskirts of the city, and demands of
us our money or our life, may we not justly slay Alexander
Nicolaiovitch, who comes to our homes in the person of his
tax-gatherers to take the bread out of our children's mouths and to help
himself to whatever he chooses by the divine right of his Romanoff
heirship? I tell you, Herr Max, we may blamelessly lie in wait for him
wherever we find him, and whoso says us nay is siding with the wolf
against the lambs, with the robber and the slayer against the honest
representative of right and justice.'
'I never met a Nihilist before,'