It is earnestly to be hoped that future Governors of Ceylon will have some regard for this noble and, for tropical work, invaluable race of animals-and it is mainly

in the hope of enlisting sympathy in their fate that I have written this paper.-Murray's Magazine.

PART I.-LYING.

THE history of Russian civilization will, when written, furnish the most striking and convincing proof of the theory advanced by certain modern thinkers, that the loftiness or baseness of the ethical code of a people bears a strict relation to the degree of their intellectual enlightenment; morality being the ethical equivalent of a nation's mental attainments. For the theory of right conduct universally accepted and acted upon in Russia may be truly affirmed to be on a level with the egotistic principles or instincts which determine the unheroic actions of the average man and woman-which is another way of declaring it devoid of ideals. And that this low level of morality is in perfect keeping with the crass ignorance and brutalizing superstition in which the masses are still hopelessly plunged, is abundantly evident to all who possess even a superficial knowl edge of the country and the people. Moreover, the efforts that have occasion. ally succeeded to an appreciable extent in raising the standard of morality in certain circumscribed districts of the empire, owe whatever success they have had to the spread of knowledge among the population; the fluctuations of the intellectual level having always made themselves immediately felt in the moral sphere. In this Russians admirably exemplify the actions of that interdependence which is no less a law of our intellectual and moral faculties than of our physical senses; and it is not more natural that the color which produces the deepest impression on the sight should at the same time heighten the intensity and increase the delicacy of our hearing, touch, and taste, than that the ignorance, superstition, and apathy which cloud the intellect, should keep down the standard of right living to their own low level. What is more surprising, however, and not explicable by the operation of any

known law, is the circumstance that the lower classes of Russians are mostly found to be bereft of those ethical qualities which, although of the essence of all true morality, yet have no traceable connection with pure intellect; such, for instance, as sensibility to the appeal of moral obliga. tion, or that fervid enthusiasm which is the chief ingredient of heroism.

I may state here, what should be obvious enough without any express declaration, that neither these general assertions nor the facts that I shall presently bring forward to illustrate and support them, imply anything in the nature of censure or reproach. To blame a people for habits which are the outcome of conditions over which they had practically no control, would argue ignorance of their history and of the nature of morality itself. It would be just as reasonable to condemn the moth for eating woollen stuffs, or to wax indignant at the depravity of those female spiders of certain species of Epeirides, who coolly devour the males as soon as the latter have discharged their natural functions, as to allot praise or blame for conduct and principles which are practically as independent of the will of the nation as its physical type. One should bring to the study of the ways and habits of men, no less than of animals, if the results are to be worth having, a spirit of intelligent curiosity equally free from prejudice and passion. When, therefore, I affirm that a careful survey of the facts of Russian social life warrants--nay, imperatively calls for-the employment of a standard of judgment widely different from that which we are wont to apply to other European people-the Russians being, as Burke would say, still in the gristle, not yet hardened in the bone of manhood-I merely state a fact which can at worst discredit their spiritual or political guides, if proved to be the result of their negligence or malice. And even a slight

acquaintance with the facts of the case is sufficient to show that an abyss divides Russian civilization from that of Western Europe on the one hand, and that this is, to a very considerable extent, the result of what may be termed artificially arrested development on the other.

By nature the Russians are richly endowed a keen, subtle understanding; remarkable quickness of apprehension; a sweet, forgiving temper; an inexhaustible flow of animal spirits; a rude persuasive eloquence, to which may be added an imitative faculty positively simian in range and intensity, constitute no mean outfit even for a people with the highest destinies in store. But these gifts, destined to bring forth abundant fruit under favorable circumstances, are turned into curses by political, social, and religious conditions which make their free exercise and development impossible, and render their possessors as impersonal as the Egyptians that raised Cheops or the coral-reef builders of the Pacific. In result we have a good-natured, lying, thievish, shiftless, ignorant mass whom one is at times tempted to connect in the same isocultural line with the Weddas of India or the Bangala of the Upper Congo, and who differ from West European nations much as Sir Thomas Browne's vegetating creatures of mere existence" differ from 66 things of life." For most of them, indeed, life, dwarfed to its narrowest conceivable limits, is void of meaning. Hopes, fears, love, sorrows (wholesome hatred has no place in their composition), are all compressed into the narrow compass of their relations to the various manifestations of a tyrannical will; and it is no wonder that the most healthy moral instincts, those that are usually marked by enduring vitality, are utterly crushed out in the process. The following incident, illustrative of a whole category of such, will give some idea of the extent to which not only moral instincts but plain common sense are absorbed by that brutalizing awe

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* The celebrated Danish littérateur Georg Brandes has a very poor opinion of Russian eloquence at its best-when inspired by genuine enthusiasm. This, however, is not a question of personal appreciation; it is a matter of fact, to the perception of which a thorough knowledge of the Russian tongue is indispensable, and every one possessed of this qualification knows that the Russians are naturally eloquent.

of the authorities which is ever uppermost in the minds of the people, hypnotizing and deadening them to every human instinct, and which the Russian Government is assiduously striving to perpetuate and develop. In the village of Stepantsy (district of Kanevsky) a peasant hanged himself last April-a merciful death in comparison with that which would have otherwise ended his sufferings. At the inquiry made into the circumstances of his death, it was elicited that hunger and want were, as usual, the motives. The evidence given by some friends of the suicide who discovered him a second or two after he had tied the fatal knot is instructive because eminently characteristic. I translate a portion of it literally from the Russian. "Now he's stark and cold," one witness remarked, "but when we first came up and saw him hanging, he was warm enough; and he dangled his legs about a good deal. There was plenty of life in him then, and for a good while after too. It's gone now." Q. "Why did you not cut him down at once?" A. "Cut him down, is it? Well, at first we were going to do it. But then we said, 'Best let him take the road he chose for himself; for if we cut him down and save him, we shall have to answer to the authorities.' So we let him hang there. And he's as cold as a stone now. 11 * There are numbers of Russians whom, in similar circumstances, fear of being answerable to the authorities would keep from saving their own fathers. That same awe of the authorities is firmly implanted in the breasts of most of the members of the educated classes, for whom no infamy is too enormous, if commanded or desired by the Government; and it is developed in them, and as fruitful of results, as that fear of God and awe of their own consciences which was the guiding principle of English Puritans. "What is your view of the immortality of the soul, gentlemen ?" the Russian satirist, Schtschedrin, makes a police official inquire of two highly educated Russian Liberals who are disciplining themselves and qualifying for the degree of " loyal" men. "In order to solve this problem in a perfectly adequate manner, is the orthodox reply, "it is absolutely necessary first of all to consult the sources. That is, to discover whether we

*Cf. Russian newspapers of 5th April last.

can lay our finger upon any paragraph of the law, or even upon any command issued by the authorities, in virtue of which we are authorized to hold the soul immortal; if so, then there is no manner of doubt, we are bound to act in strict accordance therewith; but if the laws and precepts contain no such paragraph, then it is incumbent upon us to await further orders thereunto appertaining. This is as

true and accurate an account of the manner in which the minds of the Russian people are hypnotized by the central power, as if it had appeared in a sober history instead of a biting satire.

Veracity, which has been justly called the vital force of human progress--the one thing needful in the journey onwards and upwards ad majora-is precisely that quality in which Russians are most hopelessly deficient. Indeed, in that respect they may without exaggeration be said to outdo the ancient Cretans and put the modern Persians to shame. They seem constitutionally incapable of grasping the relation of words to things, between which, to their seeming, the boundary is shadowy or wholly imaginary; and they lack in consequence that reverence for facts which lies at the root of the Anglo-Saxon character. A Russian can no more bow to a fact, acknowledging it as final and decisive, than he can to a personal appreciation or a mere opinion founded upon insufficient or no grounds; he is ever ready to act in open defiance of it; and the most serious statesman, the most sober thinker, will eagerly start a discussion on such topics as the geographical position of Java, Borneo, or Madagascar, with the same trustful, childlike expectation of seeing entirely new light thrown upon it, as if it were one of the Thirty-nine Articles or Kant's theory of time and space. A lengthy and lively conversation was lately begun between two Russian statesmen by the question put by one of them, a man who had governed his country for half a generation: Why do you suppose that the Caroline Islands are not in the Indian Ocean?" and the discussion continued quite as long, and was to the full as lively, as if it were upon some obscure question of metaphysics; nor did it once occur to either of the disputants to consult a trustworthy map. This same airy indepen

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* Cf. A Modern Idyll, p. 34.

dence of facts is visible like a white thread on a black ground in all departments of Russian life, public and private. Ask a peasant how many miles you have to walk to the next village, and if you look footsore and weary he will tell you three or four. Let your friend, looking blithe and gay, put the same question to him five minutes later, and he will answer fifteen. Facts to him are purely subjective, and he arranges them to his taste, which is often capricious, and according to circumstances which are ever varying. which are ever varying. "You lie," is a most common expression in the mouth of one gentleman to another whom he suspects of dealing arbitrarily with the facts, whether deliberately or inadvertently; and the answer of the corrected party is not unfrequently, "Yes, I do lie; it is as you say. Instead of correcting himself by saying, "I am mistaken," a Russian, who is relating an incident and has inadvertently misstated some trivial fact, will gravely say, "I am lying to you; it was not so, it was otherwise."

It is quite natural under such circumstances that comparatively little attention should be paid to words as exponents of facts, that solemn assurances should be disbelieved, promises distrusted, and calumnies be almost powerless for evil; nor can one feel astonished at that strongly marked tendency to exaggeration which disgusts the newly arrived Englishman in Russia. Russians lack the delicacy of perception requisite to discriminate the degrees that separate extremes, and the consequences of this defect stand out in bold relief in everything they put their hands to three-fourths of the address on an envelope are underlined; half a book is printed in italics; in conversation statements about the veriest trifles are emphasized by tone, pitch, gesture. People passionately appeal to their Creator in corrob oration of the assertion that there were more gnats last year than this, or that the hat you wore on your birthday fifteen years ago was trimmed not with blue ribbon but black. Your ears constantly tingle with the stereotyped oath "Yay-ee-bógoo," uttered by the costermonger, the goods-clerk, the tradesman, solemnly taking Almighty God to witness that the ribbon for which you offer him sixpence cost him tenpence half-penny; and if you are a new-comer in the country you are considerably startled to find half a minute

later, as you are leaving the shop, that he lets you have it at your own valuation, and if you indignantly refuse, even for less.

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A celebrated Russian General, almost as well known in this country, where he has some enthusiastic admirers, as in his own, whose name has gradually grown synonymous with that of liar par excellence, is erroneously looked upon as a contemporary Münchausen, the embodiment of a grotesque exaggeration of the least veracious of his countrymen, whereas in sober reality he is merely the sublimated expression of all that is characteristic of the average Russian. His verified sayings would, perhaps, if collected and published, successfully compete with the most popular book of Mark Twain or the "Danbury Newsman," and deservedly take a high place in that equivocal class of literature, notwithstanding the circumstance that the statements of the American humorists were made to amuse, while those of the Russian statesman were intended to mislead. Why do you abstain from wine, General?" asked the host one day at dinner, seeing this Russian diplomatist persist in filling his glass with water. "Because," interposed one of the guests, in a somewhat loud aside, "in vino veritas." There is a respectable, but what our Transatlantic cousins would term "shoddy" family in St. Petersburg, consisting of two elderly ladies and a brother [the Netschaïeff-Maltseffs], who having spent the best portion of their lives in the country, suddenly inherited an immense fortune and straightway abandoned tranquillity and the province for fashionable life in the capital, where their simple, artless ways and their profound veneration for the aristocracy are unfailing sources of delight to the blasé princes and princesses who enjoy their hospitality and their naiveté with equal gusto. The General, questioned one day why he never appeared at their dinners and balls, replied in a tone of engaging confidence that the fortune they had lately inherited belonged of right-moral and legal-to him, and that they knew it. He scorned, however, to take legal proceedings to recover it, and his kindliness and gentlemanly feeling forbade him to awake in them or intensify by his presence those qualms of conscience which must, he knew, be destructive of all peace of mind. Hence he systematically kept out NEW SERIES.-VOL. L., No. 5.

39

of their way. And he tells this story with such bland, childlike simplicity and candor, that some persons are to my knowledge still persuaded of its truth. It is perhaps superfluous to remark that as a matter of fact the General has as much right-moral or legal-to the property in question as the Tichborne claimant or Buffalo Bill, and that, not being of insane mind, he knows.

Some people maintain that faces never lie. The clearness or muddiness of the eye, the tell-tale shade of expression, the unmistakable accents of sincerity or prevarication combine, they say, to stamp every statement with its true moral value. To this one can only reply that the physiognomists who think thus would do well to come to Russia to study faces. There the most damnable lie, the lie that blasts and kills, is sometimes uttered with apparent reluctance, with visible pity clothed in a voice trembling with compassion-a voice that seems to come from the heart and to go straight to the heart, pleading, as it were, for the wretched creature it dooms to ruin. The features of the speaker are open, manly, noble; his expression angelic; Carlo Dolci would have been proud to transfer his face to canvas; and yet his soul Dante would have had a grim satisfaction in burying in the netheriost pit of hell. I once had dealings with a favorable specimen of the Russian peasant

at least he was recommended to me as such-a class of men whom until a few months ago Panslavists and Liberals vied with each other in idealizing, and who are still regarded by most educated Russians as inarticulate Homers, potential Napoleons, undeveloped Charlegmagnes, obscure Bayards-a view which I cannot term utterly groundless. He was a giant in size and an angel in look, and his features seemed of pellucid crystal through which his soul shone visible and pure. The late Edward FitzGerald would have called him " a grand, tender soul lodged in a suitable carcass. He was a member of an artel-a sort of Russian trades-union --to which I had entrusted the removal of some personal property to a distant city. After a few conversations he charmed me. So much practical wisdom, such perfect tact and nobility of soul in one so untutored, seemed like the realization of a miracle. I could not look upon him without comparing him with a huge uncut dia

mond of untold price. I soon learned to trust him as a brother, and when he presented his bill for payment, though I winced on seeing so many extras, I paid the money unhesitatingly and without remark. Emboldened by this he went on to mention in a very casual manner an item of £30 insurance money which he had forgotten, he said, to include in the estimate or mention in the contract. Here, however, I drew the line and flatly refused to pay, my belief in his honesty becoming mere notional assent. He looked at me for a long time in silent sadness, then tried to speak, but his voice faltered and he burst into tears, and Goliath that he was wept like a helpless child for nearly half a day, bitterly bewailing his impending ruin and that of his large family in the picturesque and forcible language of a child of nature. The servants involuntarily wept with him; perfect strangers espoused his cause and joined in. I thought myself that I felt something like a film gathering over my own eyes at last. I had already paid more than I was bound to pay by the terms of the contract, and £30 more seemed a large sum to throw away, as it were. Yet I would not willingly contribute to ruin an unoffending man with a large family, merely because he had been guilty of an oversight in my favor and to his own prejudice. So I finally handed him the money in return for a receipt. A week later I learned that not an article had been insured by him; two months afterward I discovered that this angel in human form had fleeced quite a flock of easy-going persons who believed in undeveloped Charlemagnes and peasant Bayards; that he was a regular embezzler, an inimitable comedian, who could draw tears from a stone and money from a miser.

Apart from cases of this kind, which in commercial dealings are extremely frequent, a Russian, it should be remembered in mitigation, is not conscious of guilt when telling a deliberate untruth. It is very doubtful whether, even in such aggravated instances as the above, he is really conscious that he is violating any law human or divine. For it should not be forgotten that he is suffering from complete anæsthesia of that moral faculty which in

more

or less-developed peoples is so prompt to condemn lying. To a Russian words are his own, and he simply does

"You

what he likes with them, thus exercising an indefeasible right which he freely concedes to others. Being superstitious and impressionable, he attaches great weight to religious and other ceremonies; and the complicated formalities with which an oath is sometimes administered-formalities occasionally as solemn as those that accompanied Harold's oath to William of Normandy--will at times determine a man to change a specious and elaborate lie into a simple statement of facts. Notwithstanding this, however, perjury is extremely rife in Russia; indeed, I fear that the facts which will be set forth in another paper will show it to be an acknowledged and indispensable institution in the social life of the country as now constituted, regularly and more or less satisfactorily discharging certain functions for which no other machinery at present exists. can get as many witnesses as you like, we are gravely informed by the most accredited organs of the Russian press," for a measure of vodka; witnesses who will go anywhere and testify to anything you tell them."* "In Lodz an admirably organized band exists for the purpose of bearing false witness," says the journal Svett. "The affairs of this gang are in a prosperous condition; for those classes of the population which have need of their services remunerate the members of this curious institution on a liberal scale. chief of the gang has drawn up a tariff: for evidence in a case of slander three roubles (about six shillings); † in cases of violence to the person from five to fifty roubles, and so on.", "If I wanted three or four perjurers," said a friend of mine once to me when speaking on this question, "I am acquainted with two lawyers of whom I might bespeak them, without euphemistic paraphrase or apprehension of failure." The journal Svett, which has devoted so much of its space from time to time to show up this strange state of things, for which the Government is mainly responsible, is yet highly indignant whenever criminal judges of the

* Cf. Graschdanin, April 15th, 1889.

The

+ Labor is comparatively cheap in Russia.

Svelt, 5th February, 1889. It should not be forgotten that the journal is describing not something that has been and is now no more, but a phenomenon that still exists and is de

veloping, and is one of the complex forces of modern social life in Russia.