The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎574v] (39/239)

8
AUTOCRACI AND WAR.
held the belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an in
tensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt.
Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what
remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the
way open for the liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria
makes an end of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish
from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and
rescripts. In the space of a short fifty years the self-appointed
Apostle of Absolutism and the self-appointed Apostle of Peace,
the Augustus and the Augustulus of the regime that was wont to
speak contemptuously to European Foreign Offices in the beautiful
French phrases of Prince Gorchakov, have fallen victims, each
after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the
phantom, part Ghoul, part Djinn, part Old Man of the Sea, with
beak and claws and a double head, looking greedily both East
and West on the confines of two continents.
That nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature
of the monster it is impossible to believe. But of the many wffio
must have seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps
too discreet, to speak; or else were too insignificant to be heard
or believed. Yet not all.
In the very early ’sixties Prince Bismarck, then about to leave
his post of Prussian Minister in St. Petersburg, called—so the
story goes—upon another distinguished diplomatist. After some
talk upon the general situation, the future Chancellor of the
German Empire remarked that it was his practice to resume the
impressions he carried out of every country where he had made
a long stay, in a short sentence, which he caused to be engraved
upon some trinket. “ I am leaving this country now and this is
what I bring away from it,” he continued, taking off his finger a
new ring to show his colleague the inscription inside : “La Russie
c’est le neant.”
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter, and was neither
too modest nor too discreet not to speak out. Certainly he was
not afraid of not being believed. Yet he did not shout his know
ledge from the house-tops. He meant to have the phantom for
his accomplice in an enterprise which has set the clock of peace
back for many a year. r
H e had his way. The German Empire has been an accom
plished fact for more than the third part of a century-a great and
solid legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of
Russia s might.
It is that last that is disappearing now-unexpectedly, astonish
ingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the
East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its