In the very early sixties, Prince Bismarck, then about to leave his post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called—­so the story goes—­upon another distinguished diplomatist.  After some talk upon the general situation, the future Chancellor of the German Empire remarked that it was his practice to resume the impressions he had carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he caused to be engraved upon some trinket.  “I am leaving this country now, and this is what I bring away from it,” he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside:  “La Russie, c’est le neant.”

Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest nor too discreet to speak out.  Certainly he was not afraid of not being believed.  Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops.  He meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for many a year.

He had his way.  The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more than a third of a century—­a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of Russia’s might.

It is that phantom which is disappearing now—­unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the East has always been famous.  The pretence of belief in its existence will no longer answer anybody’s purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this Neant making an armed descent upon the plains of India.  That sort of folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the real problem created for Europe by a war in the Far East.

For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to remain a Neant for many long years, in a more even than a Bismarckian sense.  The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to consider its legacy—­the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in Central Europe by its help and connivance.

The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion.  There is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint which the presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire.  The common guilt of the two Empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the Polish provinces.  Without indulging in excessive feelings of indignation at that country’s partition, or going so far as to believe—­with a late French politician—­in the “immanente justice des choses,” it is clear that a material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two