“As for the amnesty question,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “I refuse to discuss it. Both sides tire me with it. You,” he said, turning to the Cadet, “with your hysterical bomb-throwers, and you,” turning to the mild Conservative landlord, “with your bungling police. The question of amnesty is absurd, because very few criminals are in prison at all. The bomb-throwers nearly always either get killed or escape altogether. The mass of people who are in prison are there by chance. They might be in the Duma; it is a mere fluke. At Tambov the other day a clerk whom I know of went to take steps about the raising of his wages. He was arrested, together with the man who drove him, and the son of that man. They have been in prison ever since. No sort of accusation has been brought against them.” “And don’t you call that a disgraceful state of things?” said the young Cadet. “I was thinking of the amnesty as it affects the Government,” answered the man who belonged to no Party, “and I repeat that as far as danger goes it makes no difference one way or the other.” “But as a question of principle it is impossible,” said the Frenchman. “Yes, impossible not to give it,” said the Cadet. “What do you think of the Cadets?” said the man who belonged to no Party to the ex-official who belonged to the landed gentry. “I could not vote for them or against them,” he answered. “I feel with regard to them exactly as I feel with regard to the Japanese; the same combination of admiration and disgust. I feel humiliated at recognising myself to be their inferior, and proud at being in some respects their superior. I believe that there is the same difference between myself and a Cadet as there is between a Mandarin and a Japanese. Perhaps the social value of Chinese philosophy in not incomparable to the French Eighteenth Century strain, which is still so strong in us. At any rate, going back to the Cadets and the Japanese, don’t you see a likeness between the faculty of organisation that both of them possess, the grasp of technical means, the near-sighted enthusiasm? Parallels between the _ci-devant_ Russian and the Chinese have been worn threadbare. But now we are face to face with the extraordinary situation of having, as it were, Japanese and Chinamen in the same country struggling for prevalence. This is why I could neither vote for the Cadets nor against them. I feel that they are a superior and at the same time an inferior race, to whom one must leave the dirty business of governing the country just as the Merovingian Kings did with the Mayors of the Palace, reserving to themselves the faculty of healing scrofula and the divine right of remaining Kings.”