Russians and exceptionally good patriots.  M. Witte has never belonged to that class.  He believes that there is only one road to national prosperity—­the road by which Western Europe has travelled—­and along this road he tried to drive his country as rapidly as possible.  He threw himself, therefore, heart and soul into what his opponents call “Capitalism,” by raising State loans, organising banks and other credit institutions, encouraging the creation and extension of big factories, which must inevitably destroy the home industry, and even—­horribile dictu!—­undermining the rural Commune, and thereby adding to the ranks of the landless proletariat, in order to increase the amount of cheap labour for the benefit of the capitalists.

With the arguments thus supplied by Agrarians and doctrinaires, quite honest and well-meaning, according to their lights, it was easy to sap M. Witte’s position.  Among his opponents, the most formidable was the late M. Plehve, Minister of Interior—­a man of a totally different stamp.  A few months before his tragic end I had a long and interesting conversation with him, and I came away deeply impressed.  Having repeatedly had conversations of a similar kind with M. Witte, I could compare, or rather contrast, the two men.  Both of them evidently possessed an exceptional amount of mental power and energy, but in the one it was volcanic, and in the other it was concentrated and thoroughly under control.  In discussion, the one reminded me of the self-taught, slashing swordsman; the other of the dexterous fencer, carefully trained in the use of the foils, who never launches out beyond the point at which he can quickly recover himself.  As to whether M. Plehve was anything more than a bold, energetic, clever official there may be differences of opinion, but he certainly could assume the airs of a profound and polished statesman, capable of looking at things from a much higher point of view than the ordinary tchinovnik, and he had the talent of tacitly suggesting that a great deal of genuine, enlightened statesmanship lay hidden under the smooth surface of his cautious reserve.  Once or twice I could perceive that when criticising the present state of things he had his volcanic colleague in his mind’s eye; but the covert allusions were so vague and so carefully worded that the said colleague, if he had been present, would hardly have been justified in entering a personal protest.  A statesman of the higher type, I was made to feel, should deal not with personalities, but with things, and it would be altogether unbecoming to complain of a colleague in presence of an outsider.  Thus his attitude towards his opponent was most correct, but it was not difficult to infer that he had little sympathy with the policy of the Ministry of Finance.