“Bismarck,” said the Zemstvo representative, “is a case in point. He followed and used ideas. He worked for the great national ideal, the ideal of united Germany. He incarnated the national idea. What is Count Witte’s ideal? A national loan or the expansion of the Russo-Chinese Bank? It is not enough to say that the revolution is merely the work of enemies financed by foreigners, and then _Schwamm darüber_, as the Germans say. Whoever supports it, it is there; and if it were merely an artificial forced product, surely you, as a man of business, must admit that it would have died a natural death by this time. You say that the people can only be actuated by their own interests. I say that the people are often actuated by something which has nothing to do with their interests. History affords me countless examples which prove I am right. When people have been killed, tortured, and burnt for an idea, it is absurd to say they were interested. Interested in what? In the possible rewards of a future life? But people have been tortured and burnt not only for their faith but for their opinions: Giordano Bruno, De Witt, and many others. There are some, too, whose outward enthusiasm has been lined with scepticism, and who have died for a cause in which they did not even believe. And when a person now throws a bomb at a governor it may explain the fact to say he is mad, but it does not explain the fact to say that he is bought, because he knows quite well he is going to certain death. To deny this is a sign, in my opinion, of a limited intelligence. ‘Il n’a pas l’intelligence assez large,’ a French writer once said, ‘pour concevoir que l’intérêt n’est pas seul à mener le monde, qu’il se mêle souvent et qu’il cède parfois à des passions plus fortes, voire à des passions nobles.’ This is why I disbelieve in Count Witte. I believe he suffers from this limitation, the limitation from which Bismarck did not suffer. In times of peace it would not signify; in times such as these it makes all the difference. Have you read a book by H. G. Wells called the ‘Food of the Gods’? I do not know what the English think of Wells; but we, some of us at least, and the French, take him seriously as a thinker. Well, in this book there is an argument between a Prime Minister and the representative of the giant race. All the Prime Minister’s arguments are excellent, but they are fundamentally wrong, because his action is morally wrong. This story applies to the situation here. A race of giants has grown up. Count Witte, with conviction and eloquence, repeats again and again that their action is impossible, that he must be helped, that the existence of mankind is at stake. But all the time he is denying to this race the right of existence. And they know they have the right to live. He is denying the moral law and saying that his opponents are only hirelings, or madmen. His arguments are specious, but the giants are there, and