e: the one inclining towards Western Liberalism, whilst the
other cultivates the Nationalist sentiment under rather antiquated
forms. The "Westerners," "Europeans," or "Liberals," are often regarded
by the more stolid adherents of Katkoff as men lacking in patriotism.
Between these two parties--if we could speak of parties in a country
which has no ordered public life--a third group is observable: the
Panslavists, many of whom pursue, under a Liberal mask, aims favourable
to the aggrandizement of Czardom. Not a few of the Panslavists are in
reality mere Government tools. Others, who, like Aksakoff, began as
independent workers in the Panslavist cause, finally yielded to
Government temptation; but after a while even they were found to be too
much imbued with reforming ideas, and consequently were placed under
police surveillance.

The great mass of the Russian people has nothing to do with Panslavism;
it does not even know what it is. The idea of a Slav brotherhood is
foreign to it. It can be made, by much priestly preaching, to take a
sort of bigoted interest in alleged co-religionists who are said to be
ill-treated by "unbelieving Turks;" but the interest and the
understanding do not go beyond that. Such is the distinct statement made
lately by one of the best observers, Ivan Turgenieff, the novelist, in a
conversation with a German writer. As to the revolutionary party in
Russia, it has more and more become estranged from the Panslavistic
tendency--so much so that at present it stands in direct opposition to
it.

Alexander Herzen,[49] who favoured the Panslavistic cause, could still
speak, retrospectively, of Russian Czars as being "Robespierres on
horseback"--an expression of so doubtful a value that it rather reminds
us of the pseudo-revolutionary language of Napoleonism than of the purer
Democratic principles. Herzen's idea being that Constantinople should
become the capital of a great Russo-Slav Empire, we can easily
understand that he should have represented Muscovite history under such
a deceptive garb. Bakunin also was a Panslavist for a time, but of a
different type, aiming as he did at a loose Democratic Federation of the
various Slav tribes. The impossibility of this federation all those will
acknowledge who think it equally chimerical to form a Romanic Federation
between nations so dissimilar in origin, history, language, and
aspirations, as are the Italians, the French, the Spaniards, the
Portuguese, the