As a set-off to this picture of moral chaos, it should be remembered that these people when called upon to die for their revolutionary faith did so with the greatest heroism. Nor is the picture true of all revolutionaries; some of the noblest men it has ever been my good fortune to meet were Russian revolutionaries. But these were the product of an earlier and sterner school, the puritanical "Nihilism" of the 'eighties; and it is impossible to deny the substantial truth of the above description as far as the rank and file of the modern revolutionary school are concerned.[1] Such people were divided by a whole universe from the peasants to whom they offered themselves as leaders and saviours; and the schemes of regeneration which they preached were not merely useless, because purely negative, but were exotic plants which could never flourish on Russian soil. Thus the revolution triumphed for about twelve months as a purely destructive force, but when the necessity for construction arose its adherents found that they were entirely ignorant of the elements of the problem before them. This problem was the peasant, and the revolutionaries, though they had worshipped the People (with a capital P) for years and had done their best to convert them, had never made any attempt to understand them. And when the peasant discovered what the revolutionary was like, he loathed and detested him. "They hate us," a writer in _Landmarks_ confesses, "because they fail to recognise that we are men. We are, in their eyes, monsters in human shape, men without God in their soul; and they are right." [Footnote 1: It is confirmed by all impartial observers, see _e.g._ Professor Pares' _Russia and Reform_, chap. ix., entitled "Lives of the Intelligents."] There is a characteristic story told by Mr. Maurice Baring about a certain revolutionary who one day arrived at a village to convert the inhabitants to socialism. "He thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policeman. So he took a holy picture and said, 'There is no God, and I will prove it immediately. I will spit upon this _eikon_ and break it in pieces, and if there is a God He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.' Then he took the _eikon_ and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants, 'You see, God has not killed me.' 'No,' said the peasants, 'God has not killed you, but we will'; and they killed him."