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 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