bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images;
that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a
blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still
faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance,
stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already
cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of Togo and the guns of Oyama,
already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a
resurrection.

Never before had the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into
the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even
believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted,
starved souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war,
its unforgettable information. And this war's true mission, disengaged
from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from
the fields of Korea for Russian wheat or Japanese rice, from the
ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the East--its
true mission was to lay a ghost. It has accomplished it. Whether
Kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not Russia issuing next
year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses
will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. The task of
Japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of Russia's might is
laid. Only Europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent,
seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the
twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition
has vanished--never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze
at it with vague dread and many misgivings.

It was a fascination. And the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable
in its persistence as in its duration. It seems so unaccountable, that