The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎575v] (41/239)

10
AUTOCRACY AND WAR.
painful. This is not the place to speculate upon the nature of
these convulsions; but there must be some violent break-up of
the lamentable tradition, a shattering of the social, of the adminis
trative—perhaps of the territorial—unity.
Voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in
Russia is already past. This is the superficial view of a more pro
found truth that for Russia there has never been such a time within
the memory of mankind. It is impossible to initiate any sort of
reform upon a phase of blind absolutism, and in Russia there has
never been anything else to which the faintest tradition could,
after ages of error, go back as to a parting of the ways.
In Europe the monarchical principle stands justified in its
struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution of the
idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time, by
the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the
standard of absolute power these larger agglomerations of man
kind. This service of unification, creating close-knit communities
possessing the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common
ideal, has prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger
understanding : for the solidarity of Europeanism, which must
be the next step towards the advent of Concord and Justice; an
advent that, however delayed by the cowardly worship of force
and the evil passions of national selfishness, has been, and remains,
the only possible goal of our progress.
The conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national
duties and aspirations have grown under the shadow of the un
limited monarchies of Europe, which were the creations of his
torical necessity. There were seeds of wisdom in their very
violences and abuses. They had a past and a future; they were
human. But under the shadow of Russian autocracy nothing
could grow. Russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no
historical past, and it cannot hope for a historical future. It can
only end. By no industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of
benevolence, can it be presented as a phase of development through
which a society, a State, must pass on the way to the full conscious
ness of its destiny. It lies outside the stream of progress. This
despotism has been utterly un-European. And neither has it been
Asiatic in its nature. Oriental despotisms belong to the history of
mankind ; they have left their trace on our minds and our imagina
tion by their splendour, by their culture, by their art, by the
exploits of great conquerors. The record of their rise and decay
has an intellectual value , they are in their origins and their course
the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial tem
perament, of conquering force, of faith and fanaticism. The
Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. It is im-