Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments
have paid them back in the same coin. It is unthinkable that any young
Englishman should find himself in Razumov's situation. This being so it
would be a vain enterprise to imagine what he would think. The only safe
surmise to make is that he would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at
this crisis of his fate. He would not have an hereditary and personal
knowledge or the means by which historical autocracy represses ideas,
guards its power, and defends its existence. By an act of mental
extravagance he might imagine himself arbitrarily thrown into prison,
but it would never occur to him unless he were delirious (and perhaps
not even then) that he could be beaten with whips as a practical measure
either of investigation or of punishment.

This is but a crude and obvious example of the different conditions of
Western thought. I don't know that this danger occurred, specially, to
Mr. Razumov. No doubt it entered unconsciously into the general dread
and the general appallingness of this crisis. Razumov, as has been seen,
was aware of more subtle ways in which an individual may be undone by
the proceedings of a despotic Government. A simple expulsion from
the University (the very least that could happen to him), with an
impossibility to continue his studies anywhere, was enough to ruin
utterly a young man depending entirely upon the development of his
natural abilities for his place in the world. He was a Russian: and for
him to be implicated meant simply sinking into the lowest social depths
amongst the hopeless and the destitute--the night birds of the city.

The peculiar circumstances of Razumov's parentage, or rather of his lack
of parentage, should be taken into the account of his thoughts. And he
remembered them too. He had been lately reminded of them in a peculiarly
atrocious way by this fatal Haldin. "Because I haven't that, must