s 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 n