To-day it may be Borís Godunóf,[1] and to-morrow Gregory Otrépief.[2] To-day the licentious Catherine, who, with her paramours, has murdered her husband; tomorrow Pougatchéf;[3] then Paul the madman, Nicholas i., and Alexander iii.
To-day it may be Napoleon, to-morrow a Bourbon or an Orleans, a Boulanger, or a Panama Company; to-day it may be Gladstone, to-morrow Salisbury, Chamberlain, or Rhodes.
And to such governments is allowed full power, not only over property and lives, but even over the spiritual and moral development, the education, and the religious guidance of everybody.
People construct such a terrible machine of power, they allow anyone who can, to seize it (and the chances always are that it will be seized by the most morally worthless)—they slavishly submit to him, and are then surprised that evil comes of it. They are afraid of Anarchists' bombs, and are not afraid of this terrible organisation which is always threatening them with the greatest calamities.
People found it useful to tie themselves together in order to resist their enemies, as
- ↑ Borís Godunóf, brother-in-law of the weak Tsar Feódor, succeeded in becoming Tsar, and reigned in Moscow from 1598 to 1605.—Trans.
- ↑ Gregory Otrépief was a pretender who, passing himself off as Dimítry, son of Iván the Terrible, reigned in Moscow in 1605 and 1606.—Trans.
- ↑ Pougatchéf, the leader of a most formidable insurrection, was executed in Moscow in 1775. —Trans.
