circumstances, have been allowed to escape with no heavier penalty than resignation.
1. News was wired from Petrograd that Mr. Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior, was arrested at the moment when his whole attention was engaged by a spiritualist medium. Though the war has given rise to nervous religious excitement in other countries also (where rumours of similar religious vagaries on the part of influential persons have been rife), it is nevertheless peculiarly characteristic of Russia and her official representatives. Until now Russia has preserved the theocratic system which she established in the Middle Ages. The Western countries, it is true, have been, and still are, based upon theocratic traditions, but Russia’s theocracy has always been stronger in degree and quality, for it has never emerged from its mediæval stage of development. The introduction of Christianity and the Byzantine Church tended to confirm this state of affairs, for they, too, were conservative and rigid—qualities which were forced upon them at the time of the break-up of the Roman Empire, and of the changes consequent on the steady migration of many peoples from East to West, and from North to South. Byzantine Christianity, which was a theocracy, was the one unchanging institution, the one token of stability in that ever-changing world.
This Byzantine system was further strengthened by Russian geography and history. Various Turanian and other Asiatic races from the East overpowered the original Russian centre in Kiev. Moscow became the new centre, being more remote from the Tartars; but, even so, it was controlled by them for three centuries. At the same time Russia was attacked and invaded from the East by European and Western nations; under the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Germans and the Swedes, who absorbed the Letts, Esthonians and Finns, Russia was hard pressed for centuries. And so, under pressure of Mohammedanism from the East, of Catholicism, and later of Protestantism, from the West, Russia withdrew before her enemies into her own spiritual and political life. Moscow became a third Rome; Ivan III, by marrying the daughter of the last Palæologue (1472), carried on the traditions of Byzantium. It was only in the next century that Ivan the Terrible assumed the title of Cæsar (“Tsar”). The immense power wielded
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