CHAPTER V.
PERSECUTION.
In the chapters preceding this we have alluded more than once to the extreme hostility of Church and State to the Stundists. Hostility to anything and anybody that is enlightened and loves freedom is a settled policy in Russia, and has characterised the government of that country for more than three hundred years. Let a movement raise its head, having for its object either the spiritual enlightenment or the temporal benefit of the people, and it is ruthlessly crushed. The fabric of Russian power is an autocracy based on ignorance and superstition; and, therefore, it is the interest of self-preservation that has always prompted the Czar's government to crush anything that would bring enlightenment in its train. Since Peter the Great's days, when the Old Believers were so ruthlessly scourged, burnt, and banished, until the present time, a steady policy of repression has been maintained against dissent from the Orthodox Church. Thousands of the Old Believers were then banished, imprisoned, flogged, tortured; and to-day, after the lapse of nearly 250 years, thousands of Stundists and Baptists, of Molokans and Dukhobortsi, are banished to the remotest corners of the vast empire, and imprisoned and tortured in a variety of ways, only a degree less inhuman than the scourgings and rackings of the Middle Ages. The nations of the West do not seem to be alive to this. They do not seem to realise that they have at their
