The Waikato Times, THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE, AND KAWHIA ADVOCATE. Established Thirty-Four Years. THE OLDEST DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE WAIKATO. THE LARGEST CIRCULATION OF ANY DAILY PAPER SOUTH OF AUCKLAND. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1906. AUCKLAND. WRETCHED RUSSIA.

Waikato Times, Volume LVII, Issue 8005, 10 September 1906, Page 2

The Waikato Times, THAMES VALLEY GAZETTE, AND KAWHIA ADVOCATE. Established Thirty-Four Years. THE OLDEST DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE WAIKATO. THE LARGEST CIRCULATION OF ANY DAILY PAPER SOUTH OF AUCKLAND. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1906. AUCKLAND. WRETCHED RUSSIA.

The Russian bureaucrats are talking philosophy. It is impossible, says the official communique summarised in a cablegram of our last issue, for the revolutionaries to kill the ideas which inspire the Government. The reply will doubtless be made that the people who hold ideas may be killed, and that for political purposes that is the same thing as killing the ideas. But history has again and again shown this notion to be a fallacy. Whoever dies for any belief or theory thereby fastens it upon the minds of other men more firmly than before. That the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church is a saying of generally acknowledged truth, but it is coming to be recognised also that the blood of a Plehve or a General Minn infuses new vigour into the slowly - decaying life of the institutions for which such men have stood. To prohibit or destroy heretical books is seen, not merely to defeat the end in view, but ever to be the most effective advertisement such works can receive. Whether an idea is embodied in a manor a book, destruction by physical means is equally ineffectual. When a Russian Grand Duke, Minister, Governor or General falls a victim to a bomb or revolver, all his colleagues are thereby made harder, more resolute and more determined to quell the revolution. It then becomes necessary, from the revolutionist's point of view, to kill these also, and such is the terrible and interminable task that has apparently been uuderlakeu in Russia. The Government, no doubt, is right in declaring that the murder of this person or that, or even massacre of officials, will not alter the Government's aims or kill its ideas. But the clause that follows is introduced by the wrong word. "Hence," it reads (it should have read "nevertheless'), "hence revolutionaries will be met by force." The official philosophy is one-sided. It fails to take account of the fact that the revolutionaries also are inspired by ideas which, like all other ideas, whatsoever, cannot be killed by killing people. If the men on the one side stand for the principle of autocracy, those on the other are for democracy. If the C?ar and Mr Stolypin represent the idea of public order, then the Party of Toil, the disaffected soldiers and the dismissed members of the Duma, represent at least the equally indispensable and immortal idea of individual freedom. If the Government is the bulwark of the rights of property, the land-hungry peasants are an incarnation of the perennial humau demand for the access of labour to the soil. But each party supposes that it alone has something to live or die for, and neither recognises that it has undertaken the stupenduous and criminal folly of trying to kill ideas, Heuce the struggle grows more sanguinary, and the fires of hate i blazing ever more fiercely, destroy in the public mind the boundary marks of right aud wrong, until murder and massacre have become matters of every day. And after all, though the cause of the trouble lies with the autocratic oppression, both parties uow agree that order is necessary and that reform is required. The quarrel is largelv as to which of these desir. able things shall come first, and without securing either, Russia is tearin« herself in a frenzy, which, whatever its end, will leave her almost too wretched aud exhausted to be revived even by the sovereign cordial of lawful liberty.