ospects."
By Edmund Noble.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

The internal condition of Russia, though a matter of more than
speculative interest to its immediate neighbors, is not likely to become
what that of France has so often been,--a European question. The
institutions of other states will not be endangered by revolutionary
proceedings in the dominions of the Czar, nor will any oppression
exercised over his subjects be thought to justify foreign intervention.
Even Polish insurrections never led to any more active measures on the
part of the Western powers than delusive expressions of sympathy and
equally vain remonstrances. In these days, not Warsaw, but St.
Petersburg, is the centre of disaffection, and the ramifications extend
inland, their action stimulated, it may be, to some extent from external
sources, but incapable of sending back any impulse in return. Nihilism,
being based on the absence, real or supposed, of any political
institutions worth preserving in Russia, cannot spread to the
discontented populations of other countries. Even German socialism
cannot borrow weapons or resources from a nation which has no large
proletariat and whose industries are still in their infancy. In the
nature of its government, the character of its people, and the problems
it is called upon to solve, Russia stands, as she has always stood,
alone, neither furnishing examples to other nations nor able,
apparently, to copy those which other nations have set. The great
peculiarity of the revolutionary movement is not simply that it does not
proceed from the mass of the people,--which is a common case
enough,--but that it runs counter to their instincts and their needs and
rouses not their sympathy but their aversion. The peasants, who
constitute four-fifths of the population, have no motive for seeking to
overturn the government. Their material condition, since the abolition
of serfdom, is superior to that of the Italian peasantry, who enjoy the
fullest political rights. As members of the village communities, they
hold possession and will ultimately obtain absolute ownership of more
than half the soil of the country, excluding the domains of the state.
In the same capacity they exercise a degree of local autonomy greater
than that which is vested in the communes of France. They are separated
from the other classes by differences of education, of habits, and of
interests, while the autocracy that rules supreme over all is r