ure. It
also is a question which affects most seriously the interests of western
civilization. The motive for the westernizing policy is to get influence
in European politics. All the interference of Russia in European
politics is harmful, menacing, and unjustifiable. She is not, in
character, a European power, and she brings no contribution to European
civilization, but the contrary. She has neither the capital nor the
character to enable her to execute the share in the world's affairs
which she is assuming. Her territorial extensions for two hundred years
have been made at the cost of her internal strength. The latter has
never been at all proportioned to the former. Consequently the debt and
taxes due to her policy of expansion and territorial greatness have
crushed her peasant class, and by their effect on agriculture have
choked the sources of national strength. The people are peaceful and
industrious, and their traditional mores are such that they would
develop great productive power and in time rise to a strong civilization
of a truly indigenous type, if they were free to use their powers in
their own way to satisfy their interests as they experience them from
the life conditions which they have to meet.

+93. Emancipation in Russia and the United States.+ In the time of Peter
the Great the ancient national mores of Russia were very strong and
firmly established. They remain to this day, in the mass of the
population, unchanged in their essential integrity. There is, amongst
the upper classes, an imitation of French ways, but it is unimportant
for the nation. The autocracy is what makes "Russia," as a political
unit. The autocracy is the apex of a military system, by which a great
territory has been gathered under one control. That operation has not
affected the old mores of the people. The tsar Alexander II was
convinced by reading the writings of the great literary coterie of the
middle of the nineteenth century that serfdom ought to be abolished, and
he determined that it should be done.[106] It is not in the system of
autocracy that the autocrat shall have original opinions and adopt an
independent initiative. The men whom he ordered to abolish serfdom had
to devise a method, and they devised one which was to appear
satisfactory to the tsar, but was to protect the interests which they
cared for. One is reminded of the devices of American politicians to
satisfy the clamor of the moment, but to change nothing.