[Editorial] insure -> ensure

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 			<p>I once met one of the Russian functionaries who went to Poland under Milútin and Prince Cherkássky. “We had full liberty,” he said to me, “to turn over the land to the peasants. My usual plan was to go and to convoke the peasants’ assembly. ‘Tell me first,’ I would say, ‘what land do you hold at this moment?’ They would point it out to me. ‘Is this all the land you ever held?’ I would then ask. ‘Surely not,’ they would reply with one voice. ‘Years ago these meadows were ours; this wood was once in our possession; these fields, too,’ they would say. I would let them go on talking all over and then would ask: ‘Now, which of you can certify under oath that this land or that land has ever been held by you?’ Of course there would be nobody forthcoming⁠—it was all too long ago. At last, some old man would be thrust out from the crowd, the rest saying: ‘He knows all about it; he can swear to it.’ The old man would begin a long story about what he knew in his youth, or had heard from his father, but I would cut the story short⁠ ⁠… ‘State on oath what you know to have been held by the <i xml:lang="pl">gmína</i> (the village community), and the land is yours.’ And as soon as he took the oath⁠—one could trust that oath implicitly⁠—I wrote out the papers and declared to the assembly: ‘Now, this land is yours. You stand no longer under any obligations whatever to your late masters: you are simply their neighbors; all you will have to do is to pay the redemption tax, so much every year, to the government. Your homesteads go with the land: you get them free.’ ”</p>
 			<p>One can imagine the effect which such a policy had upon the peasants. A cousin of mine, Petr Nikoláevich Kropotkin, a brother of the aide-de-camp whom I have mentioned, was in Poland or in Lithuania with his regiment of uhlans of the guard. The revolution was so serious that even the regiments of the guard had been sent from <abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg against it, and it is now known that when Mikhael Muravyov was sent to Lithuania and came to take leave of the Empress Marie, she said to him: “Save at least Lithuania for Russia!” Poland was regarded as lost.</p>
 			<p>“The armed bands of the revolutionists held the country,” my cousin said to me, “and we were powerless to defeat them, or even to find them. Small bands over and over again attacked our smaller detachments, and as they fought admirably, and knew the country, and found support in the population, they often had the best of the skirmishes. We were thus compelled to march in large columns only. We would cross a region, marching through the woods, without finding any trace of the bands; but when we marched back again, we learned that bands had reappeared in our rear; that they had levied the patriotic tax in the country; and if some peasant had rendered himself useful in any way to our troops, we found him hanged on a tree by the revolutionary bands. So it went on for months with no chance of improvement, until Milútin and Cherássky came and freed the peasants, giving them the land. Then⁠—all was over. The peasants sided with us; they helped us to capture the bands, and the insurrection came to an end.”</p>
-			<p>I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the mistake that had been made. A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards “the downtrodden and the oppressed,” not a promise of such reparation later on; otherwise it is sure to fail. Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing. For revolutionists not to succeed in proving to the masses that a new era has really begun for them is to insure the certain failure of their cause.</p>
+			<p>I often spoke with the Polish exiles in Siberia upon this subject, and some of them understood the mistake that had been made. A revolution, from its very outset, must be an act of justice towards “the downtrodden and the oppressed,” not a promise of such reparation later on; otherwise it is sure to fail. Unfortunately, it often happens that the leaders are so much absorbed with mere questions of military tactics that they forget the main thing. For revolutionists not to succeed in proving to the masses that a new era has really begun for them is to ensure the certain failure of their cause.</p>
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 			<p>The disastrous consequences for Poland of this revolution are known; they belong to the domain of history. How many thousand men perished in battle, how many hundreds were hanged, and how many scores of thousands were transported to various provinces of Russia and Siberia is not yet fully known. But even the official figures which were printed in Russia a few years ago show that in the Lithuanian provinces alone⁠—not to speak of Poland proper⁠—that the terrible man, Mikhael Muravyov, to whom the Russian government has just erected a monument at Wilno, hanged by his own authority 128 Poles, and transported to Russia and Siberia 9,423 men and women. Official lists, also published in Russia, give 18,672 men and women exiled to Siberia from Poland, of whom 10,407 were sent to East Siberia. I remember that the governor general of East Siberia mentioned to me the same number, about 11,000 persons, sent to hard labor or exile in his domains. I saw them there, and witnessed their sufferings. Altogether, something like 60,000 or 70,000 persons, if not more, were torn out of Poland and transported to different provinces of Russia, to the Urals, to Caucasus, and to Siberia.</p>
 			<p>For Russia the consequences were equally disastrous. The Polish insurrection was the definitive close of the reform period. True, the law of provincial self-government (Zémstvos) and the reform of the law courts were promulgated in 1864 and 1866; but both were ready in 1862, and, moreover, at the last moment Alexander <span epub:type="z3998:roman">II</span> gave preference to the scheme of self-government which had been prepared by the reactionary party of Valuev, as against the scheme that had been prepared by Nicholas Milútin; and immediately after the promulgation of both reforms, their importance was reduced, and in some cases destroyed, by the enactment of a number of bylaws.</p>