hought, must end in the
verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on
a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very
inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of
rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the
imperative condition of her existence. The great governmental secret of
that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to
call _Le Neant_, has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. To
pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, which is
precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome
pleasantry. There can be no evolution out of a grave. Another word of
less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection
with Russia's future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as
much as of hope--Revolution.

In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung
instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn
forebodings. More or less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a
spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of
greatness. And there will be nothing of what she expects. She will see
neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of
generous greatness. Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed,
give the measure of her ignorance of that _Neant_ which for so many years
had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.

_Neant_! In a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself
be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact
form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved
within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The
saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to
destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that
could not deceive his genius. Prince Bismarck has been really
complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an
awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _Neant_--and in
Russia there is no idea. She is not a _Neant_, she is and has been
simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty
void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspi