Title:  Rescuing the Czar Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated

Author:  James P. Smythe

Release Date:  July 22, 2004 [EBook #12983]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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RESCUING THE CZAR

Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated

by

James P. Smythe, A.M., Ph.D.

THIRD EDITION

1920

PART ONE

RESCUING THE CZAR

FOREWORD

by

W.E.  Aughinbaugh, M.D., LL.B., LL.M.

Is the former Czar and his Imperial family still alive?  There are millions of people in Europe and America who are asking this question.

European governments have considered the question of sufficient interest to justify the investigation by official bodies of the alleged extinction of this ancient Royal Line.  Millions have been expended for that purpose.  Commissions have pretended to investigate the subject after the event.  Volumes have been returned of a speculative nature to authenticate a mysterious disappearance that has never been explained.

April 5; the Universal Service carried a cable from Paris reading:  “Czar Nicholas and all members of the Imperial family of Russia are still alive, according to M. Lassies, former member of the Chamber of Deputies, who has just returned from a mission to Russia.”  This was several weeks after the manuscript of the following account of the Czar’s Escape was in my possession.[A] Yet this confirmation of the manuscript has not sufficiently overcome the universally persistent doubt that has grown out of many previous imposing reports.

In certain Royal quarters the anxiety to disseminate the “reports” of their Commissions is too apparent to authorize a judicial mind to accept their speculative guesswork as convincing evidence of a legal corpus delicti when no identified bodies have ever been produced.  This eagerness to convince the world by substituting a mere disappearance, or the lack of evidence, for positive proof of the Royal assassination raises very naturally the presumption that certain circles are more interested in misleading than in satisfying the public mind.

To those schooled in the methods and objects of international propaganda during the Great War it is evident that, in a period of revolution, when thrones and dynasties become unpopular within the area of hostility and discontent, the adherents of Royalty may not be unwilling to appease the demand for vengeance by some theatrical display of meeting it with a pretense or an artifice until the passions of the populace have subsided and sober toleration resumes its sway over the sated revolutionary mind.