seen only historically, is true. Perhaps mankind has not lived

long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case.
Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth

shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious
arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the

felicity of greeting with unanimousapplause the perfect fruition
of a great State. It is even possible that we are destined for

another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in
being perpetually duped by false appearances. But whatever

political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our
admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the

magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now
driven out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none

that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity
to more unworthy supports: to the moral corruption and mental

darkness of slavery, to the mere brute force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's

feelings and reason that the downfall of Russia's might is
unavoidable. Spectral it lived and spectral it disappears without

leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service
rendered--even involuntarily--to the polity of nations. Other

despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly
fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so

gruesomely ignoble. What is amazing is the myth of its
irresistible strength which is dying so hard.

Considered historically, Russia's influence in Europe seems the
most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by

diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect,
if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were

not the main characteristic" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">characteristic of the management of international
relations. A glance back at the last hundred years shows the

invariable, one may say the logical, powerlessness of Russia. As a
military power it has never achieved by itself a single great

thing. It has been indeed able to repel an ill-considered
invasion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of

desperation. In its attacks upon its specially selected victim
this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. All the

campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time to the
last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a

well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the
half-armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or,

rather, of the Tsardom. It was victorious only against the
practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial

expansion, a glance at a map will prove sufficiently. As an ally,
Russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the

defeats rather than in the victories of her friends, but always
pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military

success. She has been unable to help to any purpose a single
principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority and

legitimism which Nicholas the First had declared so haughtily to
rest under his special protection; just as Nicholas the Second has

tried to make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive
affair. And the first Nicholas was a good Russian; he held the

belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of
faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly

envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what remained of
absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the

liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of
absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock

behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. In
the space of fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism

and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the
Augustulus of the REGIME that was wont to speak contemptuously to

European Foreign Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince
Gorchakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their

shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part
Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak and claws and a double

head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two
continents.

That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the
monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many who must have

seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too
discreet, to speak; or else were too insignificant to be heard or

believed. Yet not all.
In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his

post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called--so the story
goes--upon another distinguished diplomatist. After some talk upon

the general situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire
remarked that it was his practice to resume the impressions he had

carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a
short sentence, which he caused to be engraved upon some trinket.

"I am leaving this country now, and this is what I bring away from
it," he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his

colleague the inscription inside: "La Russie, c'est le neant."
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too

modest nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid
of not being believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the

house-tops. He meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an
enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for many a year.

He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact
for more than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy

left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,

astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which
the East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its

existence will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince
Bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of sensational

paragraphs as to this NEANT making an armed descent upon the plains
of India. That sort of folly would be beneath notice if it did not

distract attention from the real problem created for Europe by a
war in the Far East.

For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound
to remain a NEANT for many long years, in a more even than a

Bismarckian sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it
behoves us to consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that)

accomplished in Central Europe by its help and connivance.
The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice

always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in
the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental

weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial
expansion. There is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint

which the presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with
you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire. The common

guilt of the two Empires is defined precisely by their frontier
line running through the Polish provinces. Without indulging in

excessive feelings of indignation at that country's partition, or
going so far as to believe--with a late French politician--in the

"immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a material
situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains

the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two
partners in iniquity--whatever the iniquity is. Germany has been

the evil counsellor of Russia on all the questions of her Polish
problem. Always urging the adoption of the most repressive

measures with a perfectlylogical duplicity, Prince Bismarck's
Empire has taken care to couple the neighbourly offers of military

assistance with merciless advice. The thought of the Polish
provinces accepting a frank reconciliation with a humanised Russia

and bringing the weight of homogeneous loyalty within a few miles
of Berlin, has been always intenselydistasteful to the arrogant

Germanising tendencies of the other partner in iniquity. And,
besides, the way to the Baltic provinces leads over the Niemen and

over the Vistula.
And now, when there is a possibility of serious internal

disturbances destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in
Russia, the road over these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting

aspect. At any moment the pretext of armed intervention may be
found in a revolutionaryoutbreak provoked by Socialists, perhaps--

but at any rate by the political immaturity of the enlightened
classes and by the political barbarism of the Russian people. The

throes of Russian resurrection will be long and painful. This is
not the place to speculate upon the nature of these convulsions,

but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable
tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative--

certainly of the territorial--unity.