admit that; but the science of other nations has done as much. Only a
nation puffed up with conceit could imagine that it has done everything
for civilization, and the others nothing. . . . Apart from their learned
specialists, what genius has been produced in our day by this Germany
which believes itself so transcendent? Wagner, the last of the
romanticists, closes an epoch and belongs to the past. Nietzsche took
pains to proclaim his Polish origin and abominated Germany, a country,
according to him, of middle-class pedants. His Slavism was so pronounced
that he even prophesied the overthrow of the Prussians by the Slavs.
. . . And there are others. We, although a savage people, have given
the world of modern times an admirable moral grandeur. Tolstoi and
Dostoievsky are world-geniuses. What names can the Germany of William II
put ahead of these? . . . His country was the country of music, but the
Russian musicians of to-day are more original than the mere followers
of Wagner, the copyists who take refuge in orchestral exasperations in
order to hide their mediocrity. . . . In its time of stress the German
nation had men of genius, before Pan-Germanism had been born, when
the Empire did not exist. Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven were subjects of
little principalities. They received influence from other countries and
contributed their share to the universal civilization like citizens of
the world, without insisting that the world should, therefore, become
Germanized."

Czarism had committed atrocities. Tchernoff knew that by experience, and
did not need the Germans to assure him of it. But all the illustrious
classes of Russia were enemies of that tyranny and were protesting
against it. Where in Germany were the intellectual enemies of Prussian
Czarism? They were either holding their peace, or breaking forth into
adulation of the anointed of the Lord--a musician and comedian like
Nero, of a sharp and superficial intelligence, who believed that by