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Emile Joseph Dillon (21 March 1854 – 9 June 1933) was an Irish author, journalist and linguist.

Russian Traits and Terrors: A Faithful Picture of the Russia of To-Day (1891)

The history of Russian civilization will, when written, furnish the most striking and convincing proof of the theory advanced by certain Modern thinkers, that the loftiness or baseness of the ethical code of a people bears a strict relation to the degree of their intellectual enlightenment; morality being the ethical equivalent of a nation's mental attainments. For the theory of right conduct universally accepted and acted upon in Russia may be truly afifirmed to be on a level with the egotistic principles or instincts which determine the unheroic actions of the average man and woman — which is another way of declaring it devoid of ideals. And that this low level of morality is in perfect keeping with the crass ignorance and brutalizing supersti- tion in which the masses are still hopelessly plunged, is abundantly evident to all who possess even a superficial knowledge of the country and the people.
- p. 1

By nature the Russians are richly endowed: a keen, subtle understanding; remarkable quickness of apprehension; a sweet, forgiving temper; an inexhaustible flow of animal spirits; a rude, persuasive eloquence, to which may be added an imitative faculty positively simian in range and intensity, constitute no mean outfit even for a people with the highest destinies in store. But these gifts, destined to bring forth abundant fruit under favorable circumstances, are turned into curses by political, social, and religious conditions which make their free exercise and development impossible, and render their possessors as impersonal as the Egyptians that raised Cheops, or the coral-reef builders of the Pacific. In result we have a good-natured, lying, thievish, shiftless, ignorant mass whom one is at times tempted to connect in the same isocultural line with the Weddas of India or the Bangala of the Upper Congo, and who differ from West European nations much as Sir Thomas Browne's vegetating "creatures of mere existence" differ from " things of life."
- pp. 2-3

Veracity, which has been justly called the vital force of human progress — the one thing needful in the journey onwards and upwards ad majora — is precisely that quality in which Russians are most hopelessly deficient. Indeed, in that respect they may without exaggeration be said to outdo the ancient Cretans and put the modern Persians to shame. They seem constitutionally incapable of grasping the relation of words to things, between which, to their seeming, the boundary is shadowy or wholly imaginary ; and they lack in consequence that reverence for facts which lies at the root of the Anglo-Saxon character. A Russian can no more bow to a fact, acknowledging it as final and decisive, than he can to a personal appreciation or a mere opinion founded upon insufficient or no grounds; he is ever ready to act in open defiance of it ; and the most serious statesman, the most sober thinker, will eagerly start a discussion on such topics as the geographical position of Java, Borneo, or Madagascar, with the same trustful, childlike expectation of seeing entirely new light thrown upon it, as if it were of the Thirty-nine Articles or Kant's theory of time and space. ... Ask a peasant how many miles you have to walk to the next village, and if you look footsore and weary he will tell you three or four. Let your friend, looking blithe and gay, put the same question to him five minutes later, and he will answer fifteen. Facts to him are purely subjective, and he arranges them to his taste, which is often capricious, and according to circumstances which are ever varying. "You lie," is a most common expression in the mouth of one gentleman to another whom he suspects of dealing arbitrarily with the facts, whether deliberately or inadvertently; and the answer of the corrected party is not infrequently, "Yes, I do lie ; it is as you say." Instead of correcting himself by saying, "I am mistaken," a Russian, who is relating an incident and has inadvertently misstated some trivial fact, will gravely say, "I am lying to you ; it was not so, it was otherwise."
- pp. 4-5

... a Russian, it should be remembered in mitigation, is not conscious of guilt when telling a deliberate untruth. It is very doubtful whether ... he is really conscious that he is violating any law human or divine. For it should not be forgotten that he is suffering from complete anaesthesia of that moral faculty which in more or less - developed peoples is so prompt to condemn lying. To a Russian words are his own, and he simply does what he likes with them, thus exercising an indefeasible right which he freely concedes to others. Being superstitious and impressionable, he attaches great weight to religious and other ceremonies ; and the complicated formalities with which an oath is sometimes administered — formalities occasionally as solemn as those that accompanied Harold's oath to William of Normandy — will at times determine a man to change a specious and elaborate lie into a simple statement of facts. Notwithstanding this, however, perjury is extremely rife in Russia; indeed, I fear that the facts which will be set forth in another paper will show it to be an acknowledged and indispensable institution in the social life of the country as now constituted, regularly and more or less satisfactorily discharging certain functions for which no other machinery at present exists. "You can get as many witnesses as you like," we are gravely informed by the most accredited organs of the Russian press, "for a measure of vodka; witnesses who will go anywhere and testify to anything you tell them."
- p. 9

Whatever the causes of this unveracity — and they are numerous and complicated — it has struck deep roots in the Russian character, and it would need the Herculean labors of many generations of earnest men to eradicate it. If a prophet, as in olden times, were to rise up among the people, and show them whither this was leading them were he furthermore fortunate enough to inspire them with a sincere desire of mending their ways, they are and would necessarily remain powerless to carry out their wish as long as those who govern them pursue a policy which is avowedly dependent for success on the crassest ignorance of the masses and the absence, in their intellectual outfit, of a rudimentary sense of duty.
- p. 15

Thus religious belief, which might become in the Empire of the North what it has occasionally been in other countries —a germ of true progress, an unfailing source of inspiration, a temporary substitute for that positive knowledge which is the basis of all true morality —is deliberately trans- formed in Russia into an efficient instrument of demoralization. Genuine faith, as distinguished from blind superstition, is rare ; yet, whenever and wherever manifested, it is ruthlessly crushed unless it assumes the form of belief in the talismanic power of hollow forms and unintelligible ceremonies.
- p. 19

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dillon, Emile Joseph}} [[Category:1854 births]] [[Category:1933 deaths]] [[Category:Authors from Ireland]] [[Category:Journalists from Ireland]] [[Category:Linguists from Ireland]]