THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1909. A LIGHT THAT FAILED.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9641, 5 November 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1909. A LIGHT THAT FAILED.

In view of the fact that a day was recently set aside bv many Christian churches throughout Great Britain aa a day of special intercession for all Russian prisoners and captives, the "Nation" publishes a powerful but sombre article on "The Power to Suppress Opinion," in which the i writer vividly recalls the high hopes with which, leas than four years ago, the people of Russia hailed the dawn of a brighter day. It is just four years since that day when the melancholy clouds of Russian history were at last broken by a gleam of joy. The advance to freedom had ' been long and bitter. How many unknown , lives were fluDg away, how many men and women surrendered all that i 3 thought valuable in the world, passed decades entombed in solitude', endured every torment of agony, shame, and madness, disappeared into Arctic wildernesses, and took on themselves the dishonour and even the remorse of criminals so that the day of joy might rise at last! It rose, and the land was filled, as it were, with the intoxication of its light. Clouds gathered, but still it was day. Never again could that horror of interminable darkness brood over Russia. Less wild in rejoicing, but with promise of steadier radiance was that May morning when for the first time a Parliament assembled amid all the glitter and ceremony of the Church, ' the Army, and the Imperial House. But more significant than the Czar's address, or the regalia glittering on stools around him, or the Archbishop lavishly sprinkling holy water upon the representatives of t!>e people, were the cries of "Amnesty!" with which the crowded streets met the Duma members as they drove to their House, and the sight of handkerchiefs waved through prison bars by prisoners of freedom, imploring not to be forgotten on the day of liberty. "And now," says the writer, "the light of freedom has gone out; the hope has faded." And "the worst sign of all is the news that the spirit of youth is turning in desDair from the thought nf freedom, arid clutches at the easiest passing pleasure." And as an illustration of what the policy of repression has accomplished, he refers to Prince Kropotkin's Dtief pamphlet called "The Terror in Russia," issued for the Russian Parliamentary Committee. In that pamphlet the reader will find what political repression means under the Government of the Czar. It is there shown on official and public evidence that the prisons are so overcrowded with political and common offenders i

that in many gaols five prisoners are crammed into the small cubic , space constructed for one, and that, in consequence of the overcrowding, scurvy is common and the gaols have become pest-houses from which typhus spreads through the cities. The ironjjeds and chairs are removed from the cells to make room, and prisoners live on a bare floor furnished with an open sewer. At Tillis and other prisons, if they approach the window, they are shot from outside. At the caprice of the gaolers they are stamped upon and be iten without mercy. The condemned are flogged up to the font of the gallows. They are hanged while bruised and bleeding with torture Ihey are hanged while raving in the delirium of typhus. They are strapped to iron planks without moving for days and nights together. They are carted like logs to the hospital in fetters, and their irons may not be removed without the doctor's certificate of death. We return only to that melancholy note of disillusionment which we heard from Mill, a teacher so courageous and hopeful in the cause of freedom. Here are the people, or the suns and daughters of the people, to whom Europe at this moment, perhaps, owes more than to all Dther contemporaries, and this is their fate.