de the _Introduction_
to the Diplomatic Revelations, some preliminary remarks on the general
history of Russian politics appear opportune.

The overwhelming influence of Russia has taken Europe at different
epochs by surprise, startled the peoples of the West, and been submitted
to as a fatality, or resisted only by convulsions. But alongside the
fascination exercised by Russia, there runs an ever-reviving scepticism,
dogging her like a shadow, growing with her growth, mingling shrill
notes of irony with the cries of agonising peoples, and mocking her very
grandeur as a histrionic attitude taken up to dazzle and to cheat. Other
empires have met with similar doubts in their infancy; Russia has become
a colossus without outliving them. She affords the only instance in
history of an immense empire, the very existence of whose power, even
after world-wide achievements, has never ceased to be treated like a
matter of faith rather than like a matter of fact. From the outset of
the eighteenth century to our days, no author, whether he intended to
exalt or to check Russia, thought it possible to dispense with first
proving her existence.

But whether we be spiritualists or materialists with respect to
Russia--whether we consider her power as a palpable fact, or as the mere
vision of the guilt-stricken consciences of the European peoples--the
question remains the same: "How did this power, or this phantom of a
power, contrive to assume such dimensions as to rouse on the one side
the passionate assertion, and on the other the angry denial of its
threatening the world with a rehearsal of Universal Monarchy?" At the
beginning of the eighteenth century Russia was regarded as a mushroom
creation extemporised by the genius of Peter the Great. Schloezer
thought it a discovery to have found out that she possessed a past; and
in modern times, writers, like Fallmerayer, unconsciously following in
the track beaten by Russian historians, have deliberately asserted that
the northern spectre which frightens the Europe of the nineteenth
century already overshadowed the Europe of the ninth century. With them
the policy of Russia begins with the first Ruriks, and has, with some
interruptions indeed, been systematically continued to the present hour.

Ancient maps of Russia are unfolded before us, displaying even larger
European dimensions than she can boast of now: her perpetual movement of
aggrandizement from the ninth to the eleventh century