gates a Power more intolerant of religious liberty than was Spain in her worst days, and persecutors as unscrupulous and narrow-minded as Alva and Torquemada. How can they know it? Russia works in secret; her methods are underground, and her victims are voiceless. There is no press in Russia worthy the name to report and denounce each case of persecution as it occurs. The trials of heretics are conducted with closed doors, the public being carefully excluded. Russians themselves do not know a tenth of what is being done. We say that the victims are voiceless. From time to time Russia has tried her hand at persecuting peoples who are not her own—the Lutherans of the Baltic provinces, and the Jews of the south and west; but Germany has jealously watched the progress of events in the former case, hampering, and finally staying the arm of the persecutor; and a powerful European press, and the great financial influence of European Jews have been effectual in checking a vulgar persecution which threatened, at one time, to assume such gigantic proportions. But when Russia turns to her own people she persecutes humble peasants who are friendless, poverty-stricken, ignorant, who in fear and trembling suffer in silence and with dog-like resignation.
It was not until 1877 or 1878 that the Stundists began to feel the weight of persecution. Before that date there had been, of course, numerous instances where preachers had been hauled off to prison on the charge of perverting the Orthodox, and a beginning had been made of those little settlements of banished Protestants which were afterwards to assume such importance; but up till this period no steady and systematic effort had been made to extirpate the heretics, or to make them feel that as a body their disloyalty to the Orthodox Church meant outlawry and ruin, and the loss of every personal right and
