osed with pitiless
vividness. And there is but little courage in saying at this time of the
day that the glorified French Revolution itself, except for its
destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. The
parentage of that great social and political upheaval was intellectual,
the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its
royal form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from
its solitary throne to work its will among the people. It is a king
whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at
the cost of degradation. The degradation of the ideas of freedom and
justice at the root of the French Revolution is made manifest in the
person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been
the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a
sort of vulture preying upon the body of a Europe which did, indeed, for
some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. The subtle and
manifold influence for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of
violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of
obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot
well be exaggerated.

The nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a
corrupted revolution. It may be said that the twentieth begins with a
war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet
emerge a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and
dreaded phantom. For a hundred years the ghost of Russian might,
overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of Central and Western
Europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from
light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried
millions of Russian people. Not the most determined cockney
sentimentalist could have had the heart to weep for joy at the thought of
its teeming numbers! And yet they were living, they are alive yet,
since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing
crimson upon the snow of the squares and streets of St. Petersburg; since
their generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the
ditches and cover the fields of Manchuria with their torn limbs; to send
up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calling for
vengeance from Heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without
intermission or rest for twenty hours,