In a hundred years no people has been so tortured and abused by rulers of its own blood and faith as the Russians. The free peoples have nothing in their experience by which they can imagine the greed and cruelty of which the subjects of the Romanoffs have been the victims. No adequate picture of the diabolical old régime can be painted till scholars have had time to explore its archives and expose the dark forces that operated it.
Let no one look for Freed Russia to be shining and beautiful. From the gloomy caverns in which they have mouldered the Russian people stagger out upon the sunlit heights of freedom weak, bent, half blind. Few of the older will ever conquer the dense ignorance in which they were kept by autocracy. Few of the characters twisted and deformed by oppression will ever become quite straight. In the behavior of this people there will be exhibited folly, fanaticism and brutality that will make the peoples born free uneasy as to the new sister.
Whatever happens, doubt not that the Russians are gifted and great-hearted. Their excesses have proclaimed how much they were held back and brutalized by the Tsars. It will take long for them to rid themselves of the traces of their servitude and misery. Even the children born in the new era will catch from their parents some of the evil heritage. Only the grandchildren of the common people of today will come into the full birthright of the free and prove the worth that is in the Russian race.
EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS.
