“While you were away,” said Dimitri Nikolaievitch A----, “I had several long conversations with a young Englishman who had come over here to have a glimpse of the Revolution and to express his sympathy with the oppressed. He was an ardent Liberal, and he had a fine _doctrinaire_ spirit, so that although he was considerably disappointed with what he saw, or, rather, with what he did not see, his theories on Russian politics were unshaken by the facts he observed. And he remained entrenched within them as in the walls of a strong fortress. He interested me greatly, first, because he proved to me that a pet theory of mine was wrong, that no Englishman is a Liberal, and, secondly, he showed me how difficult it must be for people living in England, and unacquainted with Russian life, to form a correct estimate of what is going on here. “He talked with burning indignation of the Bureaucrats and with hope of the dawn of liberty in Russia, and the awakening giant and the ferociousness of Ministers, and when I said that the only difference between the Kadet reformers and the Bureaucrats was that the Bureaucrats formed part of the Civil Service and the Kadet reformers did not, although some of them have done so in the past, he did not understand what I meant. And yet the matter is one which any Englishman who can understand Bernard Shaw’s play, _John Bull’s Other Island_, ought to be able to grasp. In _John Bull’s Other Island_, Bernard Shaw has shown exactly how an English Liberal fails to understand the Irish question. Now, an English Liberal misunderstands the Russian question in exactly the same way as he misunderstands the Irish question. He comes to Russia bursting with indignation, and burning with enthusiasm for the cause of liberty, and he meets with polite sympathy from the Russians who, while they respect the trend and the violence of his opinions, inwardly smile at his misapprehension, his complete inability to comprehend the nature of the case. The Liberal then goes back to England and writes a book in which in lurid colours he paints the distress of the distressful country, and in which he confuses utterly the evils arising from a complicated, antiquated, and incompetent system of administration with those due to original sin.