Complete Works

find itself on awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech.  It is safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of bare feet.
    That would be the beginning.  What is to come after?  The conquest of freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to excellence.  We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the time to forget how little that freedom means.  To Russia it must seem everything.  A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates.  It appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his future with no other material but what he can find within himself.
    It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of collective wisdom.  Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old tradition disconsolately exclaimed) “il n’y a plus d’Europe!”  There is, indeed, no Europe.  The idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna Congress through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions, has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals.  Instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of nationalities much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front, and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.  Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year, almost with the event of every passing month.  This is the atmosphere Russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down.  But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of day?  An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia’s allies has found that it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for a shadow.  It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest that the modern world had ever known — and the most overbearing.  But it is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction, and no doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the French people.
    Two neighbours Russia will find at her door.  Austria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an uncertain, bilingual phrase.  Prussia, grown in something like forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil counsellor of Russia’s masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong hand to the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her substance.
    Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything but a Néant where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves without sound or trace.  It is a powerful and voracious organisation, full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours.  The era of wars so eloquently denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet.  They will be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence.  They will make us regret the time of dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency.  For, if the monarchs of Europe have been derided for addressing each other as