Freedom is in the hearts of a people, and not in legislative halls. The congress of a nation is but an expression of the freedom which the people feel in their hearts--the machine, but not the fuel which drives it. It is futile to send representatives of the people to a congress if the people do not know what they want to express. It results only in autocracy, in exploitation. If a law-maker finds that he gets as much credit for making a bad law as he gets for making a good law, neither law being understood, he soon disregards the people and works for his own ends, thus usurping power which has not been delegated to him. He becomes master instead of servant. People are responsible for their government. A wave of joy swept the United States when the news came that the Czar had fallen. We had a mental picture of two hundred million human beings able now to enjoy a liberty similar to our own. It was a great emancipation. I believe it will take several hundred years before the mass of the people of Russia will have attained a mental capacity on a par with the civilization which we know. They are still in the dim twilight of medieval times, though they are playing with modern machinery. And when it comes to turning such a nation from an absolute autocracy into a liberal republic, in which one man’s vote is as good as another’s, it is impossible without the element of time. A country so vast and so various, with the blood of so many nations running through the people, and especially a people holding the Asiatic viewpoint of government, cannot be administered immediately according to our ideal. The best that can be hoped for is a constitutional monarchy, and even if that form of government is gained, it will be for some time a dictatorship. I am forced to this conclusion. All the pity, all the sympathy we may feel for this benighted people, will not alter the facts. We cannot swing a magician’s wand and hand freedom to these people on a silver salver. We have got to face facts, and realize that the Tolstoys and Gorkys have misled us about the Russian peasant. For once given a free hand, this sublimated peasant has produced a tragedy, with himself the victim, which outdoes any tragedy the human race has ever wished itself into. The peasant has been described by Russian novelists as “inscrutable,” the inference being that behind the “dreamy eyes” and simple expressions on the faces of these people there were deep thoughts and a yearning for an ideal existence--some mysterious greatness which if we could once understand it, would reveal to us a wonderful race.