The Wanganui Herald. [PUBLISHED DAILY.] WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1906. THE WAY THE RUSSIANS HAVE FUN.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXX, Issue 11999, 17 October 1906, Page 4

The Wanganui Herald. [PUBLISHED DAILY.] WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1906. THE WAY THE RUSSIANS HAVE FUN.

Under the above heading, the San Franciaco Examiner's special correspondent in St. Petersburg gives a harrowing account of the condition of affairs in the misgoverned dominions of the Czar. The revolution, he says, is being carried on by guerilla methods, this being the most profitable way and the least costly. In organised outbreaks twenty rebels fall for one loyalist, but now that the revolutionists have adopted guerilla warfare, and restricted themselves to bombing and shooting individual policemen and soldiers, the converse is the case. It has become as safe, and much easier, to kill a policeman as to shoot a partridge. That is because the Government has lately lost all morale, because the only men in the Empire with both brains and nerves are the irreconcileables, who hold up trains, throw bombs, raid savings-banks, and fire revolvers into the cars of the adherents of despotism. The '■evolutionary murders which are daily occurring prove that conclusively. Poland has hnen the scene of mosl of these murders, which, executed with a daring and skill almost diabolical, aro being opposed by the authorities of the Government with the capacity of a gold-

fisli. In Warsaw for months past every policeman on the street has been accon - p<wicd by three soldiers with loaded rifkrand fixed bayonets. Six hundred policeim : have been shot in Warsaw this year, b; t in seventy cases of murder only nine 11 - -a^sins have been caught. The assa c s>in di% alter day catches both policemen and si '- diers unawares, shoota one, two, som.times all four, and get.-, safely away. Tinarmed soldiers forget to fire, fire at the wrong people, or, panic-stricken, run aw iv and draw np the long-winded "protocol, which in Russia i» a substitute for deed:*. The same revolutionist kills day after day. and man after man, before he is caught and executed. The Social Revolutionist Zacharievsky, before being hanged for the shooting of one policeman, boaated ami proved that he had before that killed and wounded seventeen without getting a brui9e. He had thrown bombs, fired revolvers, and thrust knives into man aft.-r man, and it was only a chance block of street traffic which led to his capture. He joked on the scaffold: "Before I am cold I will be avenged," and that day three soldiers were killed within a stone's throw of the gaol, and the assassins escaped. Even the man who is caught, handcuffed, and sot between armed guards or stone walls, has a good chance of getting away, such is the cowardly irresolution of the men who remain faithful to their uniform. Bielensteff, the robber of the Moscow Bank, guarded by eight armed men, dived through the glass window of a railway carriage while the train was travelling twenty miles an hour, and got safely away. Not all his eight armed guards could recapture him. In Astrakhan a sick woman outwitted the whole staff of the town gaol, tunnelled under the prison wails, and a week later shot a gendarme in Odessa. Women and child revolutionists systematically terrorise, rob, and kill. At Baizon a girl disguised as a man robbed the railroad station, fought and wounded two gendarmes, broke through a crowd of railroad men and got away. A schoolboy of fourteen bullied two grown men in a Moscow State drink shop into handing him over two hundred roubles. In Riga an Esthonian peasant woman chloroformed one of her guards, after deluding him into the idea that she was paying him attentions, shot the other, robbed both, and was traced to Reval, where she was merrily awaiting the mutineers from the Pamiat Asova. Not a single coup can bo scored to the Government. When the police catch assassins or discover bombs they owe it to chance or treason, and never to daring or wit. The laugh is always with the revolutionist. Hardly a day passes without some incident happening to make the authorities ridiculous. A suburban train on tho Primorsk Railway, by which tho Examiner's correspondent travelled to St. Petersburg, was Held up by a single armed robber, who defied two heavily armed gendarmes and a crowd of railway men. Tic robber jumped on the train as it was stopping at a wayside etation, thrust his revolver under the conductor's nose and demanded his takings. The gendarmes for five minutos ran frantically to and fro, gesticulating and waving their swords and calling upon the public to help, but before they had decided on a plan of action the red-shirted robber jumped from the train and disappeared into the forr.st. The gendarmes delayed the train for half an hour while they drew up a "protocol," which they asked witnesses to sign, saying that "desjnte all attempts to capture him the robber escaped." After another train robbery in South Russia, by which the State railroad lost .£6OOO, the bandits out of sheer bravado smacked the gendarme's face and told him how much they had taken before clearing off. That sort of thing, concludes tho writer, is going on all over the Empire, and every day. The guerrilla revolutionist, assured of succe&s and immunity, goes out of his way to expose to ridicule the cowardice and incapacity of his foes. And every day the revolutionist becomes more and more daring and ruthless, and his foes more pusillanimous and feeble.