German landowners, who are always sure of a hearing at the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg.
Formerly, when we were striving in vain to reconcile our sympathy and admiration for German thought and art with the narrow, haughty, and cruel spirit of its representatives amongst us, we explained it all by saying that the Germans in our provinces were of a peculiar type, and had little in common with other Germans. But the crimes of which they have been guilty in Belgium and in France show us our mistake. Germans are the same everywhere in the work of conquest and domination—wholly without humanitarian scruples. In Germany, as in Russia, there are two distinct tendencies—the one, provoked by the ideas of Pangermanism and Panslavism, is to seek national glory on the field of battle and in the oppression of the personalities of other nations; the other is to achieve the same end in the peaceful realms of thought and artistic creation. Just as the culture of which Goethe was typical has nothing in common with Prussian militarism, so Tolstoï may be considered as the representative of that other Russia which is so different from the one represented by the Russian Government of to-day. Certainly the gulf between these two tendencies is less deep
