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GREAT RUSSIA

crusade of kings against nations. The day of Holy Alliances has gone. The day of the solidarity and fraternity of nations is only just dawning. Russia, unlike France, must be left to work out her own doom or her own salvation.


III

There now only remains for us to sum up the chief conclusions to be drawn from a comparison between the situation in France in 1789 and the situation in Russia to-day. Not that I entertain much hope that those chiefly interested will give much heed to those lessons of history. Alas! in times of revolution, men are driven on by their prejudices and their passions, they are seldom guided by the light of reason or the teachings of experience. But this fact does not make it the less imperative for any one wielding a pen in Russia or elsewhere to proclaim such lessons, and to point out the only way to political and social salvation.

(1) The first and the most important lesson is this: the situations in the two cases are so fundamentally different, that no considerations as to the inevitableness of the one revolution permits us to draw an inference as to the inevitable-