DRIVEN TO REVOLT.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10574, 27 January 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

DRIVEN TO REVOLT.

RUSSIAN PEASANTS STARVED INTO REVOLUTION.

LONDON, December 6. "It should be undeistood that these peasants have, iv general, nothing against the Government of Russia. They are not idealists; they are not yet divested of reverence for the name of the Czar.

The students who lecture among them have iyfected them somewhat with a vague notion that Czar, worship is at the bottom of their troubles, that material gains, which tliey desire, and moral gains, which they do not understand, are to be had for the asking if they will discard the Ozar and ask all together m a manner sufficiently insistent. "But there could be no revolution if they were not pushed away from their sole livelihood. They are by no means a fighting people; and it has taken much ro welling to spur them to the point on which they are noiv poised. In other words, nothing could have moved them to revolution but the most complete, the most obviously sufficient grounds for revolting. All other hope has been cut off, and the longer they starve the more desperately will they riot through the ruins of law and order when their teachers give the word.

"It astounds me to see with what crazy recklessness they drive, these doomed powers and potentates. With lean murder stalking them whenever they walk abroad, with the spirit of massacre nerving itself to assault their walls, they cling yet to the old harshness of rule that passed beyond their right 50 years ago." ■ i *

The foregoing is an extract from a remarkable article by Mr Perceval Gibbon, who is now travelling through Russia for the Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette It was written from Tichonowa Pustyn (Government of Kaluga).