This topic leads directly to a very curious set of political phenomena. It can be described as political pathology. The line between sanity and madness is just as hazy here as it is in other areas. But one can usually distinguish between one man who is intelligently dedicated to a goal and another who is a fanatic. Dostoyevsky intended that all his revolutionaries should represent very dangerous forms of madness. It is obvious that Kirillov, who believes he can become God by killing himself, is insane. The drunken brute Lebyadkin, like the vicious Pyotr, idolizes Stavrogin as a god, while Stavrogin himself is a complete masochist. Erkel is described as a fanatic who can serve a cause only through one person seen as the expression of it. Shatov recognizes their abnormality. He tells the narrator that they would be lost if Russia were suddenly transformed: “They’d have no one to hate then, no one to curse, nothing to find fault with. There’s nothing in it but an immense animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism.” Even more lethal a fanatic is the terrorist Ch’en Ta Erh in _Man’s Fate_. He nerves himself for his first act of violence in the novel by driving a dagger point into his arm. Later, in a state of exaltation, he stabs a fragment of glass into his thigh to express to his companions the intensity he feels as he proposes that they should throw themselves with their bombs beneath Chiang Kai-shek’s car. Ch’en develops an almost mystical attraction toward death which he finally satisfies by shooting himself when the attempt on Chiang’s life fails. His opposite number is Konig, chief of Chiang’s police. Once tortured by the Communists, he declares “My dignity is to kill them.... I live ... only when I’m killing them.” Several of Conrad’s characters, notably Nikita the assassin in _Under Western Eyes_ and the Professor in _The Secret Agent_, are quite as ready to kill for political reasons. Warren’s Willie Stark has a fanatical bodyguard in Sugar-Boy, a stuttering gnome of a man who combines absolute devotion to Stark with the satisfaction he gets from driving a high-powered car and using a .38 Special revolver.