WALKS AND TALKS WITH TOLSTOI -MARCH, 1894 77 



Christ arrived there, he found Satan forging chains, but 

 that, at the approach of the Saviour, the walls of hell col 

 lapsed, and Satan found himself entangled in his own 

 chains, and remained so for a thousand years. 



In regard to the Jews, he said that he sympathized with 

 them, but that the statements regarding the persecution of 

 them were somewhat exaggerated. Kennan s statements 

 regarding the treatment of prisoners in Siberia he 

 thought overdrawn at times, but substantially true. He 

 expressed his surprise that certain leading men in the 

 empire, whom he named, could believe that persecution 

 and the forcible repression of thought would have any 

 permanent effect at the end of the nineteenth century. 



He then dwelt upon sundry evil conditions in Russia, on 

 which my comment was that every country, of course, had 

 its own grievous shortcomings ; and I cited, as to America, 

 the proverb: &quot;No one knows so well where the shoe 

 pinches as he who wears it.&quot; At this he asked me about 

 lynch law in the United States, and expressed his horror 

 of it. I showed him that it was the inevitable result of a 

 wretched laxity and sham humanity in the administration 

 of our criminal law, which had led great bodies of people, 

 more especially in the Southern and extreme Western 

 parts of the country, to revert to natural justice and take 

 the law into their own hands ; and I cited Goldwin Smith s 

 profound remark that &quot;some American lynchings are 

 proofs not so much of lawlessness as of a respect for 

 law.&quot; 



He asked me where, besides this, the shoe pinched in the 

 United States. I told him that it pinched in various 

 places, but that perhaps the worst pinch arises from the 

 premature admission to full political rights of men who 

 have been so benumbed and stunted intellectually and 

 morally in other countries that their exercise of political 

 rights in America is frequently an injury, not only to 

 others, but to themselves. In proof of this I cited the case 

 of the crowds whom I had seen some years before hud 

 dled together in New York tenement-houses, preyed upon 



