ature 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 rejoi