How much to be pitied are people who have never known the solidarity of human hearts and souls! (1914 letter, p282) - Catherine Breshkovsky

Russia the government every year deprives the nation of the services of 10,000 men and women, the best, most capable, and most energetic in Russia, by imprisoning some, exiling others, and putting still others under police surveillance, which makes it impossible for them to work for their country. Nevertheless, what do we see? We see the progressive movement in Russia growing day by day, and all classes taking a widespread and intelligent part in it. The system of despotic monarchy has so disgusted all the people, and the miseries resulting from it have brought them so near the verge of ruin, that no one, except a few unprincipled men immediately around the throne, is willing to have the present régime continue. And that is why all the government's efforts to crush out everything that tends to emancipation come to nothing, and cannot check the victorious march of progressive ideas, which are permeating even the deep mass of the Russian peasantry.

I have had the same experiences with other peoples, whose psychology is strange to the whole body of our nation. How well it is that science is making a successful advance toward giving different countries a knowledge of each other! It is so dull to have only strangers around us in every place on earth, when we are brothers, all coming from one source The soul is the same, the habits are different. (October 1912 letter)

This very war with Japan-this murder, this carnage, this suicide of the Russian people — was it not the act of a madman, who, seeing an abyss opening under his feet, tries to drag everything above down into it? Think of all the sorrows, atrocities, and losses resulting from this wara war that nobody needed, and that is hated and despised by the people, and then say if a government worthy of respect, and convinced of its own righteousness and strength, could have rushed into it, and thus revealed to the world all its corruption, ignorance, and contempt for its people's happiness?