nces of
Russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard
themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe, have never risen to be
the chiefs of a nation. Their authority has never been sanctioned by
popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of
political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the power of the
sword. In whatever form of upheaval autocratic Russia is to find her
end, it can never be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to
mankind. It cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a
tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who
had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth
about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the
capricious will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in
the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver, with the
wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least the force
of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown Spartacus.

A brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon Russian
achievements; and the coming events of her internal changes, however
appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive
than the convulsions of a colossal body. As her boasted military force
that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no other but faltering
blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master
with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on
awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having
first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. It is
safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain
clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes
succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of
bare feet.

That would be the beginning. What is to come after? The conquest of
freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to
excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the
time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem
everything. A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his
hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It
appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas
what is important is the spirit in which he will d