the proclamation. I will sign it at once.

PRINCE PAUL (_points on paper_). Here, Sire.

CZARE. (_starts up and puts his hands on the paper_). Stay! I tell you,
stay! The priests have taken heaven from the people, and you would take
the earth away too.

PRINCE PAUL. We have no time, Prince, now. This boy will ruin
everything. The pen, Sire.

CZARE. What! is it so small a thing to strangle a nation, to murder a
kingdom, to wreck an empire? Who are we who dare lay this ban of terror
on a people? Have we less vices than they have, that we bring them to
the bar of judgment before us?

PRINCE PAUL. What a Communist the Prince is! He would have an equal
distribution of sin as well as of property.

CZARE. Warmed by the same sun, nurtured by the same air, fashioned of
flesh and blood like to our own, wherein are they different to us, save
that they starve while we surfeit, that they toil while we idle, that
they sicken while we poison, that they die while we strangle?

CZAR. How dare--?

CZARE. I dare all for the people; but you would rob them of common
rights of common men.

CZAR. The people have no rights.

CZARE. Then they have great wrongs. Father, they have won your battles
for you; from the pine forests of the Baltic to the palms of India they
have ridden on victory's mighty wings in search of your glory! Boy as I
am in years, I have seen wave after wave of living men sweep up the
heights of battle to their death; ay, and snatch perilous conquest from
the scales of war when the bloody crescent seemed to shake above our
eagles.

CZAR (_somewhat moved_). Those men are dead. What have I to do with
them?

CZARE. Nothing! The dead are safe; you[18] cannot harm them now. They
sleep their last long sleep. Some in Turkish waters, others by the
windswept heights of Norway and the Dane! But these, the living, our
brothers, what have you done for them? They asked you for bread, you
gave them a stone. They sought for freedom, you scourged them with
scorpions. You have sown the seeds of this revolution yourself!--

PRINCE PAUL. And are we not cutting down the harvest?

CZARE. Oh, my brothers! better far that ye had died in the iron hail and
screaming shell of battle than to come back to such a doom as[19] this!
The beasts of the forests have their lairs, and the wild beasts their
caverns, but the people of Russia, conquerors of the world, have not
where to lay their heads.

PRINCE PAUL. They have the headsman's bl