The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎639r] (168/239)

PEACE AND INTERNAL POLITICS : A LETTER FROM RUSSIA. 137
“ Why don’t you attend to your business ? perhaps they’re not
dead,” the policemen, with a general cry of Pomogite, gospoda!
rushed to the sprawling bodies, bundled them into hired victorias,
and took them to hospital. The crowd and the superfluous police
men dispersed, apparently highly pleased; they did not indeed
know whether the men were dead, or had been allowed to bleed to
death ; but they had what seemed to them the essential thing : at
least three explanations of the murderer’s conduct, and one con
jecture as to his fate.
The attitude of the Tsar’s advisers in the present much grimmer
tragedy, which involves, not merely dominion in the Far East,
but the fate of the greater part of two Continents, bears un
commonly close resemblance to the conduct of the Tsar’s police
men. From a complication of injuries, external and internal,
Russia’s existence as an Autocracy and as an United Empire is
threatened with extinction. The remedy, like the extraction of
bullets from the bodies of shot dvorniks, seems, though painful,
perfectly obvious. The chief thing is to act in time. But such
indications as there are go to show that the Autocracy is not at
all thinking of such essential things as its own survival or the
survival of Russia. Like the policemen in Morskaya Street, it
will think of those things later on. At present, it is engaged in
the much more national occupation of thinking out reasons, giving
explanations, deluding itself, and trying to delude the world, into
the belief that there are no corpses in the street, that, if there are,
the chief thing is to learn who put them there—instead of
taking them to hospital, binding their wounds, or, if they are
beyond recovery, giving them a decent burial.
For three days past the small portion of St. Petersburg society
which takes any interest in politics has been languidly discussing
the consequences of Mr. Roosevelt’s carefully-prepared offer to
Russia and Japan to appoint plenipotentiaries for the purpose of
concluding a peace. Hope, it must be said, has outstripped
faith. While there is no party whatever in Russia which desires
peace at any price, there is no party which believes that Japan
will offer acceptable terms. The attitude of the Liberal Party
changed on the day Mr. Roosevelt’s message appeared. Since
the battle of Mukden it had clamoured loudly for peace, and, as
the Tsar s advisers seemed stubborn on war, no reservation was
made as to terms. When peace glimmered on the horizon all
was subordinated to the question, Would Japan offer bearable
terms ? The anti-war newspapers one and all hinted at impossible
humiliations, and, like the Reformers’ Congress just concluded at
Moscow, began to talk of making the continued war, rendered
inevitable by Japan’s greed, a national affair. Or the Zemsky
Sobor, or Representative Assembly, of M. Buluigin, they said.