“And that’s a representative of the people!” thought Mezhenétsky, as he left the old man. “And he is one of the best of them—and such ignorance! … They say” (he was thinking of Román and his friends) “that with the people as they are now, nothing can be done.”
At one time Mezhenétsky had carried on his Revolutionary activity among the peasants, and was therefore aware of the “inertia,” as he called it, of the Russian folk. He had met soldiers, some in service and some discharged, and knew their tenacious, obtuse belief in the validity of oaths and the necessity of submission; as well as the impossibility of influencing them by arguments. He knew all this, but had never arrived at the conclusion which should have been the evident outcome of that knowledge.