and children as sedate and slow as their parents. Human beings they
undoubtedly were, and yet it would have been far easier for me to grow
intimate with a dog or a cat or a horse than with one of them. I knew
that they would wait there day after day, perhaps for weeks, until a
boat came in which they could go to some distant place in which they had
heard--falsely perhaps--that the earth was more generous than in the
country they had left. Some would die by the way, all would suffer
hunger and thirst and the scorching mid-day sun, but their sufferings
would be dumb. To me they seemed to typify the very soul of Russia,
unexpressive, inactive from despair, unheeded by the little set of
Westernizers who make up all the parties of progress or reaction. Russia
is so vast that the articulate few are lost in it as man and his planet
are lost in interstellar space. It is possible, I thought, that the
theorists may increase the misery of the many by trying to force them
into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could not
believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of
industrialism and forced labour.

Nevertheless, when morning came I resumed the interminable discussions
of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a truly
popular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the
sleeping wanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen
them, since they were not material for propaganda. But something of that
patient silence had communicated itself to me, something lonely and
unspoken remained in my heart throughout all the comfortable familiar
intellectual talk. And at last I began to feel that all politics are
inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quickwitted to
torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or
theory. As we journeyed on, fed by food extracted from the peasants,
protected by an army recruited from among their sons, I wondered what we