The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎577r] (44/239)

AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
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tions 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, many 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 having 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 re
sponse 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 helpless people. Wielders of a power purchased by an un
speakable baseness of subjection to the Khans of the Tartar horde,
the Princes of Russia who, in their heart of hearts, had come in
time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of Europe,
have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. Their authority has
never been sanctioned by popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent
loyalty, of devotion, of political necessity, of simple expediency,
or even by the power of the swwd. Its only sanction has been
the fear of the lash. Thus debarred from attaining to the dignity
of chiefs, they have remained mere owmers of slaves, asserting with
half-mystical vanity the divine origin of the evil thing which had
made them and their people its own. In whatever form of up
heaval Autocratic Russia is to find her end, it can never be a re
volution fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. It can not
be anything else but a rising of slaves. It is a tragic circumstance
that the only thing one can wish to that people who had never seen
face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth about itself or the
rest of the world, who had known nothing outside the capricious
will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in the
approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver with
the wisdom of a Lycurgus or a Solon for their service, but at least
the force of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown
Spartacus.