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Excerpt from A Great Iniquity
These men, continually suffering from every kind of restriction and coercion on the part of the Government, from arbitrary exile, incarcerations, prohibition of meetings, prohibition of books, newspapers, strikes, unions - from the limitation of the rights of various nationalities, and at the same time living a life completely estranged from the majority of the Russian agricultural people, naturally see in these restrictions the chief evil, and in the liberation from it the chief welfare, of the Russian people.
Thus think the Liberals. So, also, think the Social Democrats, who hope, through popular representation, by the aid of State power, to realize a new social order in accordance with their theory. So also think the revolutionaries, hoping by substituting a new Government for the existing one, to establish laws insuring the greatest freedom and welfare of the whole people.
And yet one need only for a time free oneself from the idea which has taken root amongst our intellectuals, that the work now before Russia is the introduction into our country of those same forms of political life which have been introduced into Europe and America, and are supposed to insure the liberty and welfare of all the citizens - and to simply think of what is morally wrong in our life in order to see quite clearly that the chief evil from which the whole of the Russian people are unceasingly and cruelly suffering - an evil of which they are keenly conscious and to which they are continually pointing - cannot be removed by any political reforms, just as it is not up to the present time removed by any of the political reforms of Europe and America.
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