The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old monarchies of Europe, which were the creations of historical necessity.  There were seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses.  They had a past and a future; they were human.  But under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing could grow.  Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no historical past, and it cannot hope for a historical future.  It can only end.  By no industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can it be presented as a phase of development through which a Society, a State, must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny.  It lies outside the stream of progress.  This despotism has been utterly un-European.  Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature.  Oriental despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by their art, by the exploits of great conquerors.  The record of their rise and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism.  The Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart.  It is impossible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities, or the aspirations of mankind.  That despotism has neither an European nor an Oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth.  What strikes one with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character.  It is like a visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents:  a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or of the West.

This pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to understand by Europe.  From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation.  Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought.  Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself.  Hence the contradictions, the riddles of her national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world.  The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism.  It seems