Conservative's Consolations
nobbing with men and women whom he had thought remote as the Poles.
Two interesting examples are Madame Catherine Breshkovskaya and Mr. Samuel Gompers. Time was, and not so many years ago, when both condoned violence—the violence of the Russian Nihilist, the violence of the American dynamiter—as a short road to justice. Their attitude was not unlike that of the first Southern lynchers: "We take the law into our own hands, because conditions are unbearable, and the State affords no adequate relief." But Madame Breshkovskaya has seen the forces she helped to set in motion sweeping in unanticipated and shattering currents. She has seen a new terrorism arise and wield the weapons of the old to crush man's sacred freedom. The peasants she loved have been beyond the reach of her help. The country for which she suffered thirty years of exile repudiated her. Radicals in Europe and
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