important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that there were a powerful prince in Europe who had gone
ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the
Tartar, Mongol and Moslem, left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there were
a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the Crucified,
without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier. If there
were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill instructors to
defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what should we say to him?
I think at least we might ask him what he meant by his impudence, when he
talked about supporting a semi-oriental power. That we support a
semi-oriental power, we deny. That he has supported an entirely oriental
power cannot be denied--no, not even by the man who did it.

But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary Liberal arguments against
the latter. Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will, through
evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil. Let it
be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and the
Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the
Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a
despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did,
so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But
whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It is indeed somewhat
extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics
the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment.
They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France,
with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can any one candidly say that they
have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or
liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French Monarchy; but a worse
enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar; but