“It’s put there to be kicked out,” he answered. “Mind you, I mean _kicked_ out,” he continued, “and not to go of its own accord.” If this is the case, what my friend Dimitri Nikolaievitch hinted to me at St. Petersburg—namely, that the fact that a course was fatal, so far from constituting a guarantee that it would not be adopted, on the contrary weighed down the balance of probabilities in its favour—has come true. I cannot quite bring myself to believe it. It is only when we turn to the past—to the history of revolutionary movements in every country and at every epoch—that we see how, in obedience to some mysterious law, a fatal mist seems to blind those in authority, and how they deliberately choose the disastrous course the perils of which seem to us so obvious, and the avoidance of which seems to us so simple. In 1769 Junius addressed the King as follows:— “We separate the amiable, good-natured Prince from the folly and treachery of his servants, and the private virtues of the man from the vices of his Government. Were it not for this just distinction I know not whether your Majesty’s condition or that of the English people would deserve most to be lamented.... Your subjects, Sir, wish for nothing but that as _they_ are reasonable and affectionate enough to separate your person from your Government; so _you_, in your turn, would distinguish between the conduct which becomes the permanent dignity of a King, and that which serves only to promote the temporary interest and miserable ambition of a Minister.” In the same letter he wrote as follows about the Army:— “From the uses to which one part of the Army has been too frequently applied you have some reason to expect that there are no services they would refuse. Here, too, we trace the partiality of your understanding. You take the sense of the Army from the conduct of the Guards, with the same justice that you collect the sense of the people from the representations of the Ministry. Your marching regiments, sir, will not make the Guards their example either as soldiers or subjects. They feel and resent, as they ought to do, that invariable undistinguishing favour with which the Guards are treated; while those gallant troops, by whom every hazardous, every laborious service is performed, are left to perish in garrisons abroad or pine in quarters at home, neglected and forgotten. If they had no sense of the great original duty they owe their country, their resentment would operate like patriotism, and leave your cause to be defended by those on whom you have lavished the rewards and honours of their profession.” Finally, he makes an appeal which has been made at all times and in all countries in times of popular dissatisfaction, and has always been made in vain. The words which I am about to quote embody what has been thought in this country during all the last months by the vast majority of thinking people, by all who had brains to think and were not blinded by fanatical rage.