Morning journal and courier., 1883-05-12
Traits of Russian Character.

One can understand as one reads ssUnder- ground Russia,' and especially when ponder ing the unconscious evidence it affords, how sect like the Skoptzi the self-mutilators,
 has grown to large community, how Rus sians have been found to die on the gallows for the right to spell s'Jesus' with two Is how there once arose in the South @ sect with suicide for creed, which actually alarmed the authorities by the increase it made in local mortality The Russian as portrayed here,
 has two instinctive specialties. The relation between thought and action is in him terribly close, so close that thought is usually imma- ture and when thought has possession of him, self is totally suppressed. These Nihil- ists, for example, having forgotten God-alI educated Russians, says Stepniak, are Mate rialists, and certainly all Nihiiists are-have accepted as their dominant idea or faith that, to bring happiness or even endurable sxis- tence to the Russian millions, the existing method of government must be swept total ly away. That state of opinion is, of course, quite conceivable, and should lead, like any other new faith, to relentless intellectual pro pagandism, as. indeed, in Belgium, France and Germany it does. Being Russians, how ever, the Nihilists are impelled instantly 10 correlate thought and action, and propaga- ton by teaching being slow, they spring on the quickest and strongest instrument they can find which is necessarily terror. The faith may be made quickly executive through destruction, therefore destruction must for the time be part of the faith. It becomes part of it, and in a moment, as it were, all who hold it, who just before were virtuous and impractical professors rather than politi- oians, become ruthless assassins incendiaries, conspirators laying the axe alike to evil and good, because it exists.
 Murder-plain murder, and not only the assassination of kings-becomes for them only an act, and, being required by their be- lief, is acted The right of arson is not one they discuss even in thought, they assume it 1; and though we see no plain reference to it. Kief, that Stepniak, f@noney needful for the cause were wanting, would admit that he ap- proved theft or forgery to obtain it, at least if the victim were department of the State. Even this state of mind is not without exam ples We do not suppose that Philip II. of Spain, with Catholicism at stake, would have hesitated at murder, fre-raising, or for gerry, and, in fact, he did not hesitate at the two first. But here comes in the strange pe- cuIiarity of the case. These Nihilists are not in the least like Philip II. They are men who possess in degree almost unparalleled that power of self -abnegation, of suppress ing the carnal man, as Christian doctors say, which seems to many men, not unreasonably, the perfection of virtue. They are murder ! CTS who go to the gallows smiling and gentle ; fre-raisers who would jump into the blazing houses. if that would helps thieves who
 
 coin from the stolen money for their own in- | diligence as a disgraceful crime. All of them | hold the doctrine of free-love, most of them find female companions essential to their plans but many of them, if not all, in order to devote themselves more exclusively to their work, treat them as their sisters Im- agine 8 millionaire who would sanction and help murder, approve fire raising, aud not condemn theft from 8 treasury, and who holding and acting on those opinions prac- tises for years the most relentless parsimony toward himself, in order that all he possesses may go in furtherance of an idea which he hopes will bring good to men whom he thinks oppressed. Such man lived in Demetrlus Lisogub, who acted on his belief in precisely l those details which seem to most of us the l hardest of all
 stHis determination not to spend a single l farthinR of the money with which he could serve the cause was such that he never i'm | dulged in an omnibus, to say nothing of a cab which costs so little with that every workman takes one on Sunday. I remember that one day he showed us two articles, form ing part of his dress suit, which he wore when, owing to his position, he was com pelled to pay visit to the Governor of Ger nigov, or to one of the heads of the Superior police They were pair of gloves and an | opera hat The gloves were of a very deli cate ash-color, and seemed just purchased: He, however, told us that he had already had them for three years and smillngly explaineo to us the little artifces he adopted to Keep