ment psychology are not only out of place, but simply impossible.
In one question, the Polish, this conviction has received the supreme
sanction of the sovereign and of the Commander in Chief, and a striking
expression in the latter's manifesto to the Poles. Further than this,
the actual attitude of Russian Liberals and Radicals toward a whole
series of problems and relations cannot fail to be changed. Thus the war
will help to reconcile and soften many internal contradictions in
Russia.
How far we are, with this state of public opinion and these perspectives
of the internal development of Russia, from those fantastic pictures of
civil disunion and revolutionary conflagration which were anticipated
before the war and have sometimes been, even since the war, portrayed in
the German and Austro-Hungarian press! Our enemies counted on these
domestic divisions, and they have made a bitter mistake. Constitutional
Russia, precisely because of the radical internal transformation which
it has experienced in the period that began with the Japanese war, has
proved to be fully equal to the immense universal and national task that
has devolved upon it. The national and political consciousness of Russia
not only has not weakened, but has wonderfully strengthened and taken
shape. As one who has had a close and constant share in the struggle for
the Russian Constitution, I can only note with the greatest satisfaction
the striking result of Russia's entry into the number of constitutional
States, a result which has so plainly showed itself in the tremendous
part that Russia is playing in the great world-crisis of 1914.
Prince Trubetskoi's Appeal to Russians to Help the Polish Victims of War
[Russkia Vedomosti, No. 231, Oct. 8, (21,) 1914, P. 2.]
A new era of Russian-Polish relations has begun, and the noble
initiative of A.J. Konovalov, who has donated 10,000 rubles for the
needs of the war victims of Poland, offers a shining testimony.
Up to the present the Polish people have had relations with official
Russia only. The war has brought them for the first time into immediate
touch with _the Russian people_. Thousands of Polish exiles have gone
forth to our central provinces. In Moscow alone there are not less than
1,000 former inhabitants of Kalisz, to say nothing of fleeing people
from other provinces. Moscow, of course, attracts the largest number of
these unfortunates. Some particular instinctive faith draws the Poles
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