humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and
consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under
the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living
in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit
came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short
as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had
been with them when their very souls lay bare.

What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I
saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly
housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate;
but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we
mean the "will to life" which animates the savage man. And I now say,
with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that
can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened
of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast
country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity
there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the
dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the
number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liege
are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religious
people than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive
(not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance of
the unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which for
the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize
the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to
spiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen the
Russian peasants on their pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land,
standing (among the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations)
before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or trooping in dense
crowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. The
literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and
not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy,
Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin,
Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder
writings which speak directly to uneduca