I had finished this writing when news came of the destruction of six hundred innocent lives opposite Port Arthur. It would seem that the useless suffering and 32death of these unfortunate men who have needlessly and so dreadfully perished ought to those who were the cause of this destruction. I am not to Makaroff and other officers—all these men knew what they were doing, and wherefore, and they voluntarily, for personal advantage, for ambition, did as they did, disguising themselves in pretended , a not merely because it is universal. I rather to those unfortunate men from all parts of Russia, who, by the help of religious fraud, and under fear of punishment, have been torn from an honest, reasonable, useful, family life, driven to the other end of the world, placed on a cruel, senseless machine for , and torn to bits, drowned along with this stupid machine in a distant sea, without any need or any possibility of advantage from all their privations, efforts, and sufferings, or from the death which overtook them.  
In 1830, during the Polish war, the adjutant Vilijinsky sent to St. Petersburg by Klopitsky, in a conversation held in French with Dibitch, in answer to the latter's demand that the Russian troops should enter Poland, said to him:—
 
“Monsieur le Maréchal, I think that in that case it will be quite impossible for the Polish nation to accept this .…”
 
“Believe me, the Emperor will make no further .”
 
“Then I foresee that, unhappily, there will be war, that much blood will be shed, there will be many unfortunate victims.”
 
“Do not think so; at most there will be ten thousand 33who will perish on both sides, and that is all,”[1] said Dibitch in his German accent, quite confident that he, together with another man as cruel and foreign to Russian and Polish life as he was himself,—Nicholas I,—had the right to or not to condemn to death ten or a hundred thousand Russians and Poles.
 
One hardly believes that this could have been, so senseless and dreadful is it,—and yet it was; sixty thousand maintainers of their families lost their lives owing to the will of those men. And now the same thing is taking place.
 
In order not to let the Japanese into Manchuria, and to expel them from Korea, not ten thousand, but fifty and more thousands will, according to all probability, be necessary. I do not know whether Nicholas II and Kuropatkin say like Dibitch in so many words that not more than fifty thousand lives will be necessary for this on the Russian side alone, only and only that; but they think it—they cannot but think it, because the work they are doing speaks for itself; that ceaseless stream of unfortunate, deluded Russian peasants now being transported by thousands to the Far East—these are those same not more than fifty thousand live Russian men whom Nicholas Romanoff and Alexis Kuropatkin have they may get killed, and who will be killed, in support of those stupidities, robberies, and every kind of abomination which were in China and Korea by ambitious men 34now sitting peacefully in their palaces and expecting new glory and new advantage and profit from the slaughter of these fifty thousand unfortunate, Russian workingmen guilty of nothing and gaining nothing by their sufferings and death. For other people's land, to which the Russians have no right, which has been criminally seized from its owners, and which, in reality, is not even necessary to the Russians—and also for certain dark dealings by speculators, who in Korea wished to gain money out of other people's forests—many millions of money are spent, i.e. a great part of the of the whole of the Russian people, while the future generations of this people are bound by debts, its best workmen are from labor, and scores of thousands of its sons are mercilessly to death; and the destruction of these unfortunate men is already begun. More than this: the war is being managed by those who have hatched it so badly, so , all is so unexpected, so unprepared, that, as one paper admits, Russia's chief chance of success lies in the fact that it possesses inexhaustible human material. It is upon this that those rely who send to death scores of thousands of Rus............