Beginning to Reap.

 One of our cables to-day informs us that M. Pobyedonostseff, who represents the church in the councils of the Czar, wrote the manifesto which the Czar signed without consulting his Ministers. The terms of that manifesto are in fitting keeping with everything which preceded and has accompanied the present uprising in Russia. The action of the people of Russia in demanding a proper measure of political, social, and civic freedom, is described in the manifesto as " blind pride and insolence of evil-minded revolutionaries who are assailing the pillars of State." This is the stock jargon of tyrannical despots. It is as old as language and history itself ; and always it has proved as futile as mendacious. It is intended now, as always, to inflame the imagination of weaklings to pray or fight for "the divine right" of despots, and to arouse a world-wide storm of execration against the protesters. Already the revolutionary and sanguinary outrages which, particularly during the past few weeks, the people of Russia have committed, have caused a violent wave of blatant ignorance, or ineffable hypocrisy, or both, to sweep over many parts of the western world. The execration which has been poured on the assassins of De Plehve, Sergius, and others, exactly as is the above-quoted words from the Czar's manifesto, really is little better than hypochondriac hysterics. It is needless to say that every proper minded individual views such outrages with unbounded horror; but every such individual also will note that in this, as well as in other things, nothing can prevent due effect from following adequate cause. Enemies of the Long Parliament, with a senseless bigotry and profound hypocrisy which only the pen of a Macaulay can properly scathe, branded the participators in the crimes and follies of that momentous period with every epithet and expletive of opprobrium and infamy. Such crimes and follies are the price of liberty ; and the only question which will exert the philosophic mind will be, will the acquisition which the Russian people are seeking be comparable with the fearful sacrifices they are making for it? In other words, are the miseries of continued helotism less horrible than the sanguinary troubles of the tremendous emancipations? Has the acquisition of liberty in England compensated for and justified the fearful sacrifices which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were made for it? Surely so. And those who now hold up hands with holy horror, and turn the whites of their puritanical eyes skyward, should think more and rave less.
The really terrible feature of these national commotions and popular excesses is that their tendency is to blunt the moral perceptions of those whom circumstances drag into the maelstrom. "If it were possible," wrote Macaulay, "that a people brought up under an intolerant and arbitrary system, could subvert that system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed." And assuredly, the more violent and appalling the outrages which accompany revolution may be, no matter how much they may horrify us, the more assured may we feel that revolution, in its most terrific form, is the only possible course to amend the wrongs of the people. "The violence of those outrages," again to quote the authority mentioned, "always will be proportioned to the ferocity and the ignorance of the people, and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live. And if the Russian bureaucracy, having prohibited free discussion of public wrongs, having by the most atrocious means, kept the people in darkest ignorance concerning their duties and their rights, their retribution is not only natural ; it is just. They have suffered from popular ignorance because they themselves have with held the key of knowledge ; they have been assailed with blind fury, because they have exacted an equally blind submission to the must frightful forms of oppression and degradation. In short, they have reaped the harvest of their own sowing.
The world is being told by sententious self-appointed constitutionalists, that the people of Russia are not yet fit to be in possession of popular freedom. That proposition is laid down with all the authority of a maxim. All will remember that famous fool, who resolved not to go near the water until he had learned to swim. The obvious inference to he drawn from the proposition above set out, that if the Russian people patiently remain in national slavery, the process will teach them to be wise and liberty loving; until finally, they will become eminently fitted for the possession and enjoyment of perfect freedom. If that inference is sound, Hampden was the worst enemy England ever had ; the barons at Runnymede were nothing but truculent ruffians ; and every great patriot known to history was merely a violent incendiary, trying to force on the inevitable evolution of the ages. Logicians have a derisive designation for individuals who argue on these lines. Bacon himself used it very frequently.
It is a mere platitude to say that the distinguishing characteristic of every great revolution is that the worst comes first. The immediate effects are atrocious outrages, and abhorrent crimes, awful errors of judgment, and conflicts of purpose. Till men have been for some time in possession of full freedom, they are unused how to make the most and best of it. But to see nothing but the present horrible confusion, to note nothing but the continued atrocities, and not to see beyond, where the permanent results in the form of liberty and wisdom, moderation and mercy await, were reprehensible obliquity. If those who, while admitting that the people of Russia have passed through a novitiate such as that described by Dante, yet execrate the methods by which they are trying to effect for themselves the fearful exorcism, will remember that only out of chaos can order be educed ; that the mightiest nations have risen on the blood and ashes of civil upheavals, they will begin to look with the eye of the stern philosopher, rather than with that of the mealy-mouthed moralist, on the events now sweeping on throughout Russia.

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 - 1947), Monday 6 March 1905, page 6