bare feet.

That would be the beginning. What is to come after? The conquest of
freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to
excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the
time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem
everything. A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his
hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It
appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas
what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of
freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the
endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his
future with no other material but what he can find within himself.

It would be vain for Russia to hope for the support and counsel of
collective wisdom. Since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old
tradition disconsolately exclaimed) "il n'y a plus d'Europe!" There is,
indeed, no Europe. The idea of a Europe united in the solidarity of her
dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the Vienna
Congress through the subsiding dust of Napoleonic alarums and excursions,
has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals.
Instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of
nationalities much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front,
and since its greatest triumphs at Sadowa and Sedan there is no Europe.
Meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are
alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and
mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year,
almost with the event of every passing month. This is the atmosphere
Russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down.
But what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of