POSTSCRIPT

I made that forecast in the year 1906 and everything that has happened since tended to confirm it.

But what of the future? the reader may ask. Have Russia's sands indeed run down? Will her dissolution not be followed by a glorious resurrection? In answer to these and kindred questions it may be pointed out that the province of the historian and that of his less ambitious auxiliaries is to supply the public with relevant and well-sifted facts, not with forecasts that cannot be verified.

From the partial sketch outlined in the foregoing pages it may seem to follow that the Russian people has been not merely knocked out of the lists as a belligerent, but also permanently incapacitated as a nation for a prominent part in the politico-social progress of the world. And one may ask why I have refrained from drawing this conclusion? For if it be true that the bulk of the population is intellectually benighted, morally obtuse, politically indifferent, and socially incohesive, it follows that it is also insensible to the only motives strong enough to determine such an effort as would make regeneration possible. Not even an army can be raised until these conditions are remedied. And an army is but the first of a long series of conditions requisite for a new birth. When Russia has national forces again, she will be in possession of a most important element of renewed vitality, but only of one. And as yet she is still far removed even from that.

Those who reason thus are assuming that the future development of mankind will run on the lines of its past progress. And the grounds for this assumption are inadequate. Yet oddly enough, many of these critics are also zealous champions of the supremacy of right over force and of arbitration as a substitute for war, and these doctrines, warped it may be and discoloured, are to be discerned at the roots of Russia's great renunciation. It must therefore be acknowledged that the Russian people are in a more fitting mood to listen to President Wilson's scheme of future reconstruction than any of their neighbours. That the various parts of the Tsardom will be put together again and the breath of life poured into the reintegrated and rejuvenated organism is to my thinking improbable. The principle of national self-determination for which the Allies profess to be fighting is apparently an effectual barrier to this were there no other. The utmost that one can hope is that the Russian race will unite and come into its own.

The majority of the nation is still hardly more than raw material for the State-builder. It lacks almost all the advantages which religion, education, instruction, political training, economic development, and intercourse with progressive peoples have bestowed on its competitors, and it is hampered with the vices which a grinding and ruthless tyranny working unhindered for centuries succeeded in grafting on its impressionable soul. That so much of what is humane still survives in the Russian—his natural religion of pity, his pitiless self-criticism, his enthusiasm for noble causes, his detachment from the grosser sides of life, and the cheerful alacrity with which he will die for an idea or a friend—bespeaks an equipment, intellectual and moral, which if properly cultivated may reasonably be expected to bring forth excellent fruits.

One cannot fully understand the first act of the Russian revolution until the curtain has fallen on the last, nor before one has seen the channels traced by circumstance for the civilising currents of the future is it possible to divine the part in the making of history which the nation will be qualified to play. Ages of ignorance and serfdom may have suspended but have not wholly crushed the freedom of spirit, the fellow-feeling for suffering, and the embryonic humanities characteristic of the race. These qualities, freed from the many and noxious weeds with which they are still entangled, may yet make of Russia a potent social force capable of being directed to a high ethical purpose.

E. J. DILLON.