This being the case, he naturally opposes all other religious bodies in Russia as not merely inflicting injury upon Christianity, but as tending to the political disintegration of the empire. Never, in any of our conversations, did I hear him speak a harsh word of any other church or of any religious ideas opposed to his own; but it was clear that he regarded Protestants and dissident sects generally as but agents in the progress of disintegration which, in Western Europe, seemed approaching a crisis, and that he considered the Roman Catholic Church in Poland as practically a political machine managed by a hierarchy in deadly hostility to the Russian Empire and to Russian influence everywhere. In discussing his own church, he never hesitated to speak plainly of its evident shortcomings. Unquestionably, one of the wishes nearest his heart is to reform the abuses which have grown up among its clergy, especially in their personal habits. Here, too, is a reason for any repressive policy which he may have exercised against other religious bodies. Everything that detracts from the established Russo-Greek Church detracts from the revenues of its clergy, and, as these are pitifully small, aids to keep the priests and their families in the low condition from which he is so earnestly endeavoring to raise them. As regards the severe policy inaugurated by Alexander III against the Jews of the empire, which Pobedonostzeff, more than any other man, is supposed to have inspired, he seemed to have no harsh feelings against Israelites as such; but his conduct seemed based upon a theory which, in various conversations, he presented with much force: namely, that Russia, having within its borders more Jews than exist in all the world besides, and having suffered greatly from these as from an organization really incapable of assimilation with the body politic, must pursue a repressive policy toward them and isolate them in order to protect its rural population. While he was very civil in his expressions regarding the United States, he clearly considered all Western civilization a failure. He seemed to anticipate, before long, a collapse in the systems and institutions of Western Europe. To him socialism and anarchism, with all they imply, were but symptoms of a wide-spread political and social disease--indications of an approaching catastrophe destined to end a civilization which, having rejected orthodoxy, had cast aside authority, given the force of law to the whimsies of illiterate majorities, and accepted, as the voice of God, the voice of unthinking mobs, blind to their own interests and utterly incapable of working out their own good. It was evident that he regarded Russia as representing among the nations the idea of Heaven-given and church-anointed authority, as the empire destined to save the principle of divine right and the rule of the fittest.