“Yes, but that is the kind of thing which I believe is on the eve of disappearance,” said the man who belonged to no Party. “I believe, and of course the wish is not only father to the thought—but I wish hard in order that the thought may come true—I believe that we are on the eve of a social revolution, and that besides this Russia will split up into separate parts. I hope this will happen. Had I been an Englishman, I should have been a little Englander with a vengeance. I should like to go back to the Heptarchy. I admire the England of Shakespeare and Drake, which was little, more than the England of Kipling and Rhodes, which is big. I admire the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven more than the Germany of William II.—and whom? There is no one else to mention. The same with Russia. All that we have derived from ideals of expansion has ended in disaster. If we split up, who knows what the Duchy of Transbaikalia and the Kingdom of Kalouga, for instance, and the Republic of Morshansk may not produce?” “But,” said the philosopher, “what will happen if the power falls into the hands of angry demagogues of the Extreme Left? What if they behave as the Convention behaved, and, more reasonably, what if you have all the tyranny of a Convention and none of the terror? All the inconvenience and none of the excitement? In Russia you boast of the _liberté de mœurs_ you enjoy; don’t you think you run a risk of losing it?” “It is true, of course,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “that we run a risk of losing it, but I have a great faith in the invincible plasticity of the Russian character. And liberty of manners seems to me to depend on national characteristics and not on national institutions. You can prove, of course, that liberty of manners and liberty of thought flourish abundantly under autocratic _régimes_ such as those of Nero and Nicholas II., but does it necessarily follow that it cannot exist under lawful and disciplined administration? Ancient Greece and Modern England are two cases in point where personal liberty such as that which we enjoy in Russia is nonexistent. ‘Il ne faut pas l’oublier,’ says Renan, ‘Athènes avait bel et bien l’inquisition.’ As to Anglo-Saxon countries there is no more amusing spectacle in the world than that which is offered to us when a member of the Slav race seeks refuge in Anglo-Saxon countries burning with enthusiasm for the mothers of freedom. Witness Maxim Gorky’s arrival in America. He soon finds out that he is enclosed in a brick wall of prohibitions, and perhaps he thinks with regret of his native country, where, although he was not allowed to insult his Monarch at a public meeting, he could do exactly what he liked. The rigidity of conventions in England seems to me to arise from the English character, which is rigid and likes convention; but the Russian character is not rigid; it is pliant and draws no line anywhere. That is at once all its strength and all its weakness.