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And finally, the half-brutal, half-savage, wholly ignorant condition of her one hundred and forty million peasants, is due, not in any wise to the tyranny of mere kings and overlords, but to the relentless, never-dying, never-staying cruelty of that unconquerable ruler, whose abuse of power is to be stopped by neither rebellion nor assassination; and whose heart is to be warmed to humanity by no tears, by no appeal; by the lashes of whose frozen knouts a great people has been beaten into apathy, their brains deadened through physical suffering, their children's children bearing a hopeless heritage down to generation after generation of those who wage, from birth to death, their dreary, dragging warfare with the real tyrant of Russia, monarch unlimited and unapproachable, the Winter of the North.
There stood the bearded assistants of the executioner, there lay the knouts and other instruments, and with eager glances the people devoured all: they found all these preparations admirable, they rejoiced with unrestrained delight in the prospect of seeing the handsomest woman in the realm flayed with the knout.
Their black conical caps and long beards, their great side-buttoned coats, and pockets stuffed with protrusive cartridges, their prancing horses, their leaded knouts, struck a blood-curdling discord amid the prayerful, white-wrapped figures.
On the Tsar's birthday, a band of students marched to the steps of the Winter Palace. They went peacefully, with trust in their hearts, no weapon in their hands. They were surrounded by Cossacks, who beat them with knouts, riding them down. They were boys, some of them hardly out of the Gymnasium, the flower of our youth, brave sons of Russia ready to fight for her and die."
In the years between the October of 1879 and that of 1884, he performed the hardest labor of his career. His life was one of Spartan simplicity; nor, though about him Russia fainted beneath the terrible blows of nihilist knouts, did he once lift his head to catch so much as an echo of the furore.
Well-meaning stay-at-home gentlemen constantly rose to their feet in the House of Commons and made withering remarks on the subject of knouts, and Cossacks, and vodka. But they did no harm. The Russian people do not understand English.
White-gowned chief-slaves lording it over green and orange gowned supervisors and clerks; overseers still carrying and frequently using whips and knouts and sandbag flails. Once or twice, when a Masterly back was turned, he caught a look of murderous hatred flickering into the eyes of some upper-slave.
There was recently held at Petersburg an international exhibition of instruments of torture, handcuffs, models of solitary cells, that is to say instruments of torture worse than knouts or rods, and sensitive ladies and gentlemen went and amused themselves by looking at them.
"I have said there was to be no use of the knouts," he said sharply, turning upon the drivers. "Forward with them!" The first driver muttered. "What sayest thou?" Atsu demanded. The man's mouth opened and closed, and his eyes drew up, evilly, but he made no answer. "Forward with them," Atsu repeated, without removing his gaze from the driver.
Still like some huge and grotesque beast the back of the clustered Things ran for half a mile at least behind, tapering to a dragon tail that coiled and twisted another full mile toward the Pit. And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling tentacles, fanged crests.
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