to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness.  The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation.  The worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds.  The greatest horror of the world—­madness—­walked faithfully in its train.  Some of the best intellects of Russia, after struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss.  An attentive survey of Russia’s literature, of her Church, of her administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the Russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence.  The great governmental secret of that imperium which Prince Bismarck had the insight and the courage to call Le Neant, has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope.  To pronounce in the face of such a past the word Evolution, which is precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry.  There can be no evolution out of a grave.  Another word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with Russia’s future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as much as of hope—­Revolution.

In the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn forebodings.  More or less consciously, Europe is preparing herself for a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of greatness.  And there will be nothing of what she expects.  She will see neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous greatness.  Her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that Neant which for so many years had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies.

Neant!  In a way, yes!  And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form.  The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved within a ring.  If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately.  The saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his genius.  Prince Bismarck has been really complimentary