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 to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. There is an
awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _Neant_--and in
Russia there is no idea. She is not a _Neant_, she is and has been
simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty
void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards
personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling
desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that
have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal
conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift