It has accomplished it. Whether
Kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next
year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses
will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. The task of
Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is
laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent,
seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the
twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition
has vanished--never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze
at it with vague dread and many misgivings.

It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable
in its persistence as in its duration. It seems so unaccountable, that
the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what Russia
will or will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether
it will bury the Japanese in Manchuria under seventy millions of
sacrificed peasants' caps (as her Press boasted a little more than a year
ago) or give up to Japan that jewel of her crown, Saghalien, together
with some other things; whether, perchance, as an interesting
alternative, it will make peace on the Amur in order to make war beyond
the Oxus.

All these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print;
and if they have been gravely considered by only one reader out of each
hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the
composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the
columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of
feverish credulity. The printed page of the Press makes a sort of still
uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of
genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of
having something exciting to talk about.

The truth is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our
middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great--who imagined that
all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom--can do nothing.
It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished for ever at
last, and as yet there is no new Russia to take the place of that ill-
omened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in
reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a
monument of fear and oppression.

The true