Tchehov, indeed, was born with an impulse towards reverence and faith. Though he denied that he was either a Liberal or a Conservative, he excited himself about causes like a schoolboy revolutionary. He had a religious sense of justice. He was ardently on Zola’s side during the Dreyfus excitement. “Let Dreyfus be guilty,” he declared, “and Zola is still right, since it is the duty of writers not to accuse, not to persecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring imprisonment.... There are plenty of accusers, persecutors, and gendarmes without them, and in any case the rôle of Paul suits them better than that of Saul.” He quarrelled with Suvorin for attacking Zola. “To abuse Zola when he is on his trial--that is unworthy of literature.” We find the same ardent reforming spirit running through the whole of Tchehov’s life. At one time he is engrossed in a project for building in Moscow a “People’s Palace,” with a library, reading-rooms, a lecture-room, a museum, and a theatre. At another time, he is off to the island of Saghalin to study with his own eyes the horrors of the Siberian penal system. “My God,” he writes in the course of his investigations, “how rich Russia is in good people! If it were not for the cold which deprives Siberia of the summer, and if it were not for the officials who corrupt the peasants, Siberia would be the richest and happiest of lands.” In another letter he looks forward to building a school “in the village where I am a school-warden.” When a plague of cholera breaks out, we find Tchehov once more living for others with the same saintly unselfishness. At times, no doubt, he cursed the cholera and he cursed his patients like a human being; but his cries were the cries of an exhausted body; they were merely a proof of the zeal that had worn him out. There is an attractive portrait of Tchehov at this time in the biographical sketch that precedes the English translation of his letters: He returned home shattered and exhausted, but always behaved as though he were doing something trivial; he cracked little jokes and made everyone laugh as before, and carried on conversations with his dachshund Quinine, about her supposed sufferings. This may be consistent with the philosophy of despair. It is certainly very unlike the practice of despair. But that Tchehov’s creed was the opposite of a creed of despair may be seen in letter after letter. In one letter he writes: I believe in individual people. I see salvation in individual personalities scattered here and there all over Russia--educated people or peasants--they have strength though they are few. In another letter he says: