I now perceive why all men are the deadly and uncompromising enemies of the rattlesnake:  it is merely because the rattlesnake has not speech.  Monarchy has speech, and by it has been able to persuade men that it differs somehow from the rattlesnake, has something valuable about it somewhere, something worth preserving, something even good and high and fine, when properly “modified,” something entitling it to protection from the club of the first comer who catches it out of its hole.  It seems a most strange delusion and not reconcilable with our superstition that man is a reasoning being.  If a house is afire, we reason confidently that it is the first comer’s plain duty to put the fire out in any way he can —­drown it with water, blow it up with dynamite, use any and all means to stop the spread of the fire and save the rest of the city.  What is the Czar of Russia but a house afire in the midst of a city of eighty millions of inhabitants?  Yet instead of extinguishing him, together with his nest and system, the liberation-parties are all anxious to merely cool him down a little and keep him.

It seems to me that this is illogical—­idiotic, in fact.  Suppose you had this granite-hearted, bloody-jawed maniac of Russia loose in your house, chasing the helpless women and little children—­your own.  What would you do with him, supposing you had a shotgun?  Well, he is loose in your house-Russia.  And with your shotgun in your hand, you stand trying to think up ways to “modify” him.

Do these liberation-parties think that they can succeed in a project which has been attempted a million times in the history of the world and has never in one single instance been successful—­the “modification” of a despotism by other means than bloodshed?  They seem to think they can.  My privilege to write these sanguinary sentences in soft security was bought for me by rivers of blood poured upon many fields, in many lands, but I possess not one single little paltry right or privilege that come to me as a result of petition, persuasion, agitation for reform, or any kindred method of procedure.  When we consider that not even the most responsible English monarch ever yielded back a stolen public right until it was wrenched from them by bloody violence, is it rational to suppose that gentler methods can win privileges in Russia?

Of course I know that the properest way to demolish the Russian throne would be by revolution.  But it is not possible to get up a revolution there; so the only thing left to do, apparently, is to keep the throne vacant by dynamite until a day when candidates shall decline with thanks.  Then organize the Republic.  And on the whole this method has some large advantages; for whereas a revolution destroys some lives which cannot well be spared, the dynamite way doesn’t.  Consider this:  the conspirators against the Czar’s life are caught in every rank of life, from the low to the high.  And consider: