hed with
laborious care and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, not a
warrior.

Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has marked organic
resemblances with that of the Poles and the Czechs. His sombre
courage, his enduring fortitude, are a commonplace. Eyiau and
Friedland attested this, and many a later field, and the chronicle of
his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, from Kutusov to Todleben,
illustrate the justice of Napoleon's verdict, "unparalleled heroism in
defence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has never forged an
instrument for the perfection of a great political ideal. War has
served the oppression, the ambition of his governments, not the
aspirations of his race. Conceived as the effort within the life of
the State towards a higher self-realization, the Slav knows not war.
He has used war for defence in a manner memorable for ever to men, or
for cold and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a constructive
ideal, stretched across generations or across centuries, he has never
used it. Even the conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the
Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, through the wars of Ivan
IV, and his successors, attests this. The Don Cossacks destroy the
last remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment flung off from
the convulsion of the thirteenth century, ruled by a descendant of
Ginghis. The government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits of
Cossack valour, but in the administration of its first remarkable
conquest the irremediable defect of the Slavonic race declares itself.
The innate energy, the determining genius for constructive politics
which marks races destined for empire, everywhere is wanting. Indeed
the very despotism of the Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character,
derives its present security, as once its origin, from the immovable
languor, the unconquerable tendency of the Slav towards political
indifferentism. Nihilism, the tortured revolt against a secular wrong,
is but a morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that have marked
the Slav throughout history. Catherine the Great felt this. Its
spirit baulked her enterprise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that
now if ever was the opportunity to recover Constantinople from "the
fanaticism of the Moslem." The impressive designs of Nicholas I left
the heart of the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism which
has occasionally startled or revolted Eur