When the gay and gentle Starinyevitch was a student, a manifesto was found in his possession. Unwilling to incriminate another, he refused to say from whom he received it. For this omission he spent twenty years in filthy prisons. While searching the room of Rosovsky who was not yet twenty, the police discovered a proclamation of the Executive Committee. "Who gave it to you?" "That I cannot say. I am not a spy." He was sentenced to death and died on the scaffold.[18] Kropotkin mentions another youth of nineteen who posted a circular in a railway station. He was caught and killed--hanged I think. "He was a boy," says Kropotkin, "He was a boy but he died like a man." Ask a Revolutionist if he knows Sophia Bardina and his glowing eyes will answer yes. Because she read a couple of articles in public, she was condemned to several years' penal servitude, which by special favor of the czar was commuted to life-long exile. Leo Deutsch in his mild and modest _Sixteen Tears in Siberia_, tells of a few girls of Romny who hit upon the plan of loaning one another books and making notes on them. Soon a few young men joined, and thus was formed a small reading society, such as might help to pass away the long winter evenings in the dull provincial town. For this--and for absolutely nothing but this--"the conspirators of Romny" were deported across the Urals. Only a couple of years ago, several schoolteachers met at Tiflis to discuss the best method of improving their educational curricula. A commander entered and cried, "Disperse!" Turning to his cossacks he said, "These women are yours"--and all were raped with impunity. As long as the Romanoffs rule Russia, only idiots opaque and impervious to reason, can speak of education without action. If education were permitted, revolutionary violence would not be, because terrorism is the last straw to which the drowning nation clutches. They cling to this because under existing circumstances nothing else is possible, nothing, nothing, nothing. Russia has produced no greater Terrorist than Gregory Gershuni, and when this glorious Jew stood before his "judges" he told them: "History will forgive you everything; the centuries of oppression, the millions you have starved to death, the other millions you have sent to be butchered on the battlefield; everything but this--that you have driven us who mean well with our fatherland to seek recourse in murder."[19] Men cannot meet for purposes of discussion, because if they do, they will be beaten and bayoneted. Children cannot, for they will be hacked to pieces. Women cannot, for their bodies will be utilized to warm the beds of cossacks. Such liberticide must be answered by tyrannicide! And the hand that holds a dagger, red with the blood of a despot, is the noblest hand of all! FOOTNOTES: