“We must have a Constitution, just as we have an Army and a Navy, because the idea soothes the revolution-haunted breasts of foreign financiers, but we shall never have a real Constitution because we don’t want one. Reforms? Oh, yes, as many as you please, on paper, signed and countersigned, but they will remain a dead letter, because they are not adapted to the character and the spirit of the nation. You cannot force Russian peasants to own land in the way Western peasants do. You can make laws telling them to do so, but if you force them you will only drive them to rebellion. Russia is like China; you can draw up a Constitution for Russia, but when it is carried out you will find that the only practical difference between the old state of affairs and the new is that the writing-table of the Minister of Foreign Affairs is to be oblong instead of round. People say that the Russian people is good and that its Government is bad, but the faults of the people are not the result of the inherent vices of the Government; the vices of the Government are the logical result of the faults, which in their turn are the inevitable complement of the good qualities, of the people. The desire for Liberal reforms based on Western examples is merely a fictitious agitation of a minority, namely, the ‘Intelligenzia’ or middle class, who have forgotten and lost their native traditions and instincts and have adopted and not properly assimilated the traditions and instincts of Western Europe. They have ceased to be Russian, and they have not become European. They have taken the European banner of ideals, but they do not know what to do with it; they cannot hold it up in their weak Slav hands. The result is words, words, words. This chatter will continue for a time, and when people get tired of listening, it will cease. As for the people, the real people, they will settle their affairs with those immediately connected with them, with their landlords, &c. The Government will make plenty of reforms on paper and have a Duma; but everything will go on exactly as it was before. Because you cannot change the character of a people, and the form of government they enjoy is the result and the expression of their qualities and of their defects.”