No. 3: “Dans ses accès de vertu, l’homme croit pouvoir se passer entièrement de l’égoisme et de l’intérêt propre; l’égoisme prend sa revanche, en prouvant que l’absolu désintéressement engendre des maux plus graves que ceux qu’on avait cru éviter par la suppression de la propriété.” These are my texts, and, as is usually the case when the text is good, the sermon is superfluous. New Year’s Day is, we are so often told, a good occasion to look forward and behind. What, then, is the outlook at present? Life is going on at St. Petersburg and Moscow exactly as usual, and here, save in the smouldering ruins of the factory of the Presnaya and various broken windows and damaged cornices, there is nothing to tell one that anything unusual has occurred. The Government is said to be confident. Foreign loans are in the air. The revolutionaries, it is said, have been crushed and dispersed. Electioneering work is beginning; in fact, all is going as well as can be expected. That is one view—an optimistic view which I do not altogether share. In the first place, when people say that the Revolutionary Party or its leaders are a minority I would reply by quoting text No. 1. “Laws, in a country which is following an idea, are always made by the minority,” says Renan, immediately before the sentence I have quoted. Secondly, the Moscow episode does not seem to me to have affected the revolutionary movement in the slightest degree. The numbers of the killed among the insurgents were trifling; all the important and real leaders of the Revolution had left Moscow before this affair, which was, in fact, conducted by boys and girls; and if a number of boys and girls can, at the head of a mass of workmen, bring the garrison to distraction, take guns from the troops, and force the authorities to bombard the houses of the inhabitants without raising universal indignation, things must be fairly serious. To say that they have alienated public sympathy is certainly untrue; for although they started the fighting, as soon as the authorities answered with artillery the common ordinary man in the street began in many cases to say that it was the fault of the Government and the authorities. Sympathy in Russia is always certain to be with the people who are shot, be they right or wrong. “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim-gun and they have not.”