and 1914 into rapid germination.

As far back as the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the
present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and
ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian
Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A
barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs all the
poison of Europe and then gives it off in greater quantity and deadlier
intensity. When we admit Russia, we admit the cholera, dissolution,
death. That is the meaning of Russian propaganda. Yesterday she said to
us, 'I am Christianity.' To-morrow she will say, 'I am socialism.' It is
the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a
sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait
of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random,
of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still reach and slay.

"It might commove Europe and bespatter it with blood, but that would not
hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the abysmal ooze of
definite dissolution."

Russia, then, led by domiciled aliens without a fatherland, may be truly
said to have been wending steadily toward the revolutionary vortex long
before the outbreak of hostilities. Her progress was continuous and
perceptible. As far back as the year 1906 the late Count Witte and
myself made a guess at the time-distance which the nation still had to
traverse, assuming the rate of progress to be constant, before reaching
the abyss. This, however, was mere guesswork, which one of the many
possibilities--and in especial change in the speed-rate--might belie. In
effect, events moved somewhat more quickly than we anticipated, and it
was the World War and its appalling concomitants that precipitated the
catastrophe.

As circumstances willed it, certain layers of the people of central
Europe were also possessed by the revolutionary spirit at the close of
the World War. In their case hunger, hardship, disease, and moral shock
were the avenues along which it moved and reached them. This coincidence
was fraught with results more impressive than serious. The governments
of both these great peoples had long been the mainstays of monarchic
tradition, military discipline, and the principle of authority. The
Teutons, steadily pursuing an ideal which lay at the opposite pole to
anarchy, had risked every worldly and well-nigh every spiritua