The Social Revolutionists, on the other hand, are an out-and-out revolutionary organization in the usually accepted sense. This party believes in barricade fighting when circumstances seem propitious. At all times its propaganda encourages preparation for armed revolts, and instils the belief that it is through insurrection that the balance of power will eventually be wrested from the bureaucracy. While indorsing insurrection, the Social Revolutionists find that there are long periods when active revolt is inexpedient, when the people are for the moment exhausted, their resources drained, their spirits dampened by the cruel reaction such as characterized the period of M. Stolypin’s ministry, from the day of the dissolution of the first Duma. Yet there are always those who chafe under inaction, and who can not cease from the strife so long as life and liberty are spared them. Of such are the Maximalists, an offshoot of the Social Revolutionists, whose exploits thrilled all Russia from time to time during 1906, but whose reckless daring resulted in the almost complete extermination of the party. Terrorism proper is not a blind, fanatical policy of bloodshed. It is a phase of warfare which can be logically justified even when it can not be sentimentally accepted. Assassination in a country where normal, peaceful conditions prevail can never be justified. But terrorism, as it exists in Russia, rests on the basis that Russia is not only in an abnormal condition, but it is a country seething with internal war. The government maintains its army on a war footing; during the entire year of 1906 at least four fifths of the empire was kept under martial law, military trials and punishments were meted out to ordinary civil offenders, and the men were executed for crimes so petty as stealing less than ten dollars. The Russian government maintains a state of perpetual warfare against its own people, therefore the ethics of a peaceful land do not at all apply to Russia. Terrorism does not mean reckless and indiscriminate bloodshed. On the contrary, it means the prevention of bloodshed because victims of the red terror are almost without exception tyrants whose lives, and régime, if permitted to continue, would demand the lives of numberless victims falling under their rule. The assassination of a Plehve, a Sergius, a Pavlov, a Luchenovsky, sends a nation to its knees in praise and thanksgiving--I speak, I believe, without exaggeration--because the taking of each one of those lives saved the lives of many innocents who would have fallen under their merciless régime, precisely as hundreds did fall before these pitiless rulers were overtaken by the terror.