Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/73

like England, where man has conquered Nature, where Nature has become the benevolent and ministering servant of man. There are other countries, like Russia, where it is Nature that always threatens to enslave man. In few other countries have men been compelled to submit to that physical despotism with a more passive resignation, the resignation of a Tolstoi, which is so representative of the race. And in no other country has Nature given more cruelly and more emphatically the lie to the noble dreams of idealists. Idealists may dream their dreams, proclaim their systems, and claim their reforms. But the great natural, economic, climatic forces in Russia continue to follow their immovable course, heedless of systems and reforms. The political destiny of Russia seems to have been written not in the book of philosophy, but in the stern and sibylline book of Nature; it has followed the bend of rivers and the curves of isothermic lines; and one guesses its mystery, and one catches its meaning more surely and more easily by listening to the murmur of forests and steppes than by listening to the most plausible theories of revolutionists."