of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the
way open for the liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end
of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind
a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. In the space of
fifty years the self-appointed Apostle of Absolutism and the
self-appointed Apostle of Peace, the Augustus and the Augustulus of the
_regime_ that was wont to speak contemptuously to European Foreign
Offices in the beautiful French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen
victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to
the phantom, part ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with beak
and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the
confines of two continents.

That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the
monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many who must have seen,
all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak;
or else were too insignificant to be heard or believed. Yet not all.

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