“I mean that in his book he is capable of saying, ‘Russia is such a terrible country that if a convict fells a warder he is flogged.’ He talks of the bloodthirsty Bureaucrats and the iron-fisted Governors, and then of the Russian Liberals as if they belonged to an entirely different race of people, as if, for instance, they possessed the qualities, and those only, which are special to the admirable British middle-class. Now, just think of this question of Bureaucracy for a moment. To talk of the bloodthirsty race of Bureaucrats is absurd. Nine-tenths of educated Russians are Bureaucrats, and the majority of these Bureaucrats are probably Liberals and would vote for the Kadets unless it were too inconvenient. Some of the higher officials among these same Bureaucrats have often admittedly been excellent men; in any case there is no difference of kind between the Russian who is a high official or a small public servant and the Russian who is a doctor, a lawyer, a political agitator, a novelist, an actor, or an anarchist. “Where, then, is the mischief? The mischief is in the system, and the misunderstanding arises from a misuse of words, which in its turn is caused by a disinclination to think clearly. When people say Bureaucracy they mean Autocracy. Russia is governed by the autocratic system, and an Autocracy, unless, as happens every now and then in the course of centuries, the autocrat is a man of genius like Peter the Great, Cromwell, or Napoleon, means this, that the country governed by an autocrat is governed in reality by a mass of officials, who claim that they are directly responsible to the monarch, and who are at the same time considered to be responsible to the monarch’s Ministers. They end by being responsible to nobody, since the people who are set beneath them can complain of them to those who are in authority over them, and therefore not one of them, from the lowest telegraph clerk to the Prime Minister, is sure of his position, because the Prime Minister can be sent away at a moment’s notice, according to the Sovereign’s whim. The result of this is that the individual counts for nothing, and the better the Bureaucrat the more hopeless his position, since there is no guarantee for the laws being enforced, and when a people sees that sometimes the laws are enforced, and at others they are not, according to circumstances, and according to the nature and rank of the persons they affect, they become less inclined to obey the laws. Therefore, what Russia is suffering from is not want of liberty, but want of law. In Russia we have the licence of the Press, and the power of suppressing newspapers. What we want is order. Now, lots of Russians argue that the autocratic system and its attendant lawlessness are simply the inevitable result of the Russian character, out of which it has grown. I should be more inclined to believe this if exactly the same system had not existed in France and been subsequently