to make such traditions come true. In this way, falsehoods have a knack of growing into truth. Respect the pretence of knowledge long enough and you will wake up one fine morning alive to genuine love of culture. Hypocrisy is the forerunner of sincerity. It is the masquerade that proceeds the reality.
Moscow had boasted its pride of study so much that it had come to demand an independent life for its students. Their thought was to be untrammelled. Its professors were actually free spirits, inspired by the dignity of their calling. They sensed its earnestness and declined to flatter, servilely, autocracy. They were not panderers, like the old-time Greeks, willing to wait in the ante-room of authority. They were men, actual living human beings, and not schoolmasters. Their function was to develop in the students' personality and understanding responsibility. The students, on their part, responded gladly to the liberal and radical teachings of the professors. Here, in the very heart of Moscovy, Czarist barbarism notwithstanding, flourished the cameraderie of knowledge. Youth and age belonged equally to the great Commune of learning. It was the period of the Russian Renaissance.
Czarism, and its police agents, through the desolating pestilence of their authority made increasing warfare on these professors. Their devotion to education was rewarded with secret denunciation and exile without trial. Sometimes the penalty was unrecorded translation to eternity, the pet Muscovite method of governmental assassination. A teacher became suspect naturally. His book lore placed him at the mercy of ignorant inspectors and innumerable auxiliaries of the police department. Wisdom was outlawed. Learning died. Weak men bowed before the ruling system. Their genius declined. Personality extinguished, they became mere police shadows, nervous creatures of routine. Even talent disappeared into the abyss that had been prepared for genius. Lectures were merely recitals of the Czar's standing orders. Incapable masters were kept in office for their proved incapacity by cynical police considerations. The seminary became a cemetery. And yet, where the grave is, there is always the resurrection. Knowledge banned was love barred. It was revered. The students, in their devoted quest, proved the truth of Moncure Conway's words; "They who menace our freedom of thought and speech are tampering with something more powerful than gunpowder." Our day has witnessed the explosion.
The French were forbidden. Voltaire, whose name is at once romance, legend, history and satire! Rousseau! There is more than one Rousseau in the book of fame as there was more than one Jesus at the time of the wanderer of Nazererth. But there is only one Rousseau who lives in the memory of mankind. The others are recorder in the very dulltone, whose pages one sometimes idly turns. This is the parish register of the dead great: great they were were but they are dead. Jean Jacques, who lived from 1712 to
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