impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that
there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree
serve even the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready
for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the
absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to
alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the
march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into
oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions
sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has not been the business of
monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and
consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in
favour of a larger conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness,
force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action,
they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set
in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve. Yet,
for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant,
perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived. The revolutions of
European States have never been in the nature of absolute protests _en
masse_ against the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of the
people against the oppressive degeneration of legality. But there never
has been any legality in Russia; she is a negation of that as of
everything else that has its root in reason or conscience. The ground of
every revolution had to be intellectually prepared. A revolution is a
short cut in the rational development of national needs in response to
the growth of world-wide ideals. It is conceivably possible for a
monarch of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without
ceasing to be the king of his people. For the autocracy of Holy Russia
the only conceivable self-reform is--suicide.

The same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler and his