They fear that if the question of a Republic is brought forward there will be a general massacre of the educated bourgeoisie, the so-called “Intelligenzia.” Nothing is more probable. Some people say that nothing will really change the attitude of these people: no more than any amount of measures which one of Lord Salisbury’s Cabinets might have adopted would have changed the opinion of the supporters of Mr. Gladstone or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, or _vice versâ_. That it is utterly futile to expect common sense or common fairness from them. That they have their party feeling, to which they are ready to sacrifice everything, and that it is infinitely stronger and more bitter, and necessarily stronger and more bitter, than anything of which we have had experience in England during the last century. Some people object that they understand the militant revolutionaries being in this frame of mind, but they do not understand the more intelligent passive and detached supporters of the advanced party sharing such childish views. The more intelligent and detached supporters are even more violent in their talk than the militant fighters. At present the kind of argument one hears used is like the following, which I have heard with my own ears. I have heard intelligent cultivated people say: “How wicked and cowardly of the Government to fire upon the revolutionaries, since they have guns and the revolutionaries haven’t got any.” The English mind, which, be it Liberal or Conservative, tends to common sense, revolts against such reasoning. It is rare to find in Russia an Englishman who sympathises with the revolutionaries. English common sense revolts at the hysterical impatience which demands the immediate fulfilment of measures more radical and socialist than exist in any European state, and the common British sense of fairness is violated at hearing of the wanton murder of policemen, who earn a poor living and are in no way responsible for the misdeeds of the Government, exalted as a patriotic execution worthy of Harmodius and Aristogiton. On the other hand I think we fail—I am alluding to Englishmen who visit Russia, and not to those who live here permanently—to realise that the Russians have been up to now destitute of certain guarantees which Englishmen regard as a matter of course, and that they do not consider they have obtained these guarantees yet; and here it is difficult to contradict them.