The fundamental error underlying the main theories of people who write with indignation on the massacres of Jews in Russia seems to me to contain in itself everything which makes it difficult for Englishmen to understand current events in Russia. The error is that the Russian Government, which such writers would be the first to proclaim incompetent, imbecile, stupid, ineffectual, purposeless, without a policy, shifting, distracted, fickle, wavering, unstable, weak, corrupt, insolvent, dislocated, tottering, and rotten to the core, should at the same time be so competent, so united, so perfect a machine, so drastically single-minded, so unfaltering in design, and so masterly in execution that one man in St. Petersburg can by pressing a button have his anti-Semitic will carried out in the smallest detail in any village of the immense Russian Empire. The great error is to think that attacks on Jews or anything else which has occurred in Russia during the last three years has been the result of one policy conceived by one master mind and executed by well-trained and perfectly organised instruments responding directly to that one mind. The truth is that there has been no policy in Russia during the last few years, but an ever-shifting mass of contradictory currents. During the last three years[7] it can be said that there has been no Government at all; nothing but the anarchy resulting from civil war, a civil war which is not fought in pitched battles--as that which was waged in England between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads--but carried on in the ordinary course of everyday life by what are termed peaceful citizens of the community, during their everyday avocations, by every means at their disposal. The anarchy resulting from such a state of things is rendered doubly anarchial because one of the sides in the conflict is recruited in some degree from the very officials and public servants on whose service the proper administration of the State depends. [7] 1904-7.