can.”  It is a retort against which hypocrisy cannot long stand out.  It proves that a new standard of judgment is slowly forming in the world.  But for this new standard, where would be the Congo agitation, or the movement against the Portuguese cocoa slavery, or such sympathy as exists with the Nationalists of India, Egypt, and Persia?  When the doctrines of equal rights or even of moral and material amelioration are assumed, honesty will at last raise her protest and hypocrites be no longer allowed to reap the harvest of a quiet lie.

It is an advance.  As history counts time it is a rapid advance.  Now that Russia is reducing Finland to a state of entire subjection without even a pretext of right or the shadow of a pretence at improved civilisation, a general feeling of shame and loss pervades Europe.  The governments do not move, but here and there the peoples raise a protest.  Not even the most thorough-going champions of Imperialism, such as the Times, have ventured to defend the action.  They have contented themselves with Cain’s excuse that the murder was no affair of ours.  A century and a half ago they would not have needed an excuse.  No protest would have been raised, for it did not matter what nationality was enslaved.  There is an advance, and we have now to extend it.  In regard to races already subject, we have but to act up to the pleadings of our own hypocrisy; we have to maintain among them equal justice, equal rights and equal consideration as members of one great community, instead of depriving them of their manhood and kicking them out of their own railway carriages.  We have to train them on the way to self-government, instead of clapping them into prison if they mention the subject.

And in regard to nationalities that still retain their freedom, we must bring our governments up into line with the leading thought of the day.  We must show them that the destruction of a free people like Finland or Persia is not a local or distant disaster only, but affects the whole community of nations and spreads like a poison, blighting the growth of freedom in every land and encouraging all the black forces of tyranny, darkness, and suppression.  Rapidly growing among us, there is already a certain solidarity between free States, and the problem of the immediate future is how to make their common action effective on the side of liberty.  When I saw Tolstoy during the Russian revolution of 1905 he said to me: 

“The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even a revolution; it is the end of an age.  The age that is ending is the age of Empires—­the collection of smaller States under one large State.  There is no true community of heart or thought between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus and all our other States and races.  And what has Hungary, Bohemia, Syria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria?  No more than Canada, Australia, India, or Ireland has to do with England.  People are now beginning to see the