Perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth
shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of
statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting
with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great State. It is
even possible that we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether:
that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances.
But whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or
our admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the
magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven
out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its
retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy
supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the
mere brute force of numbers.
This very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's feelings and
reason that the downfall of Russia's might is unavoidable. Spectral it
lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single
generous deed, of a single service rendered--even involuntarily--to the
polity of nations.
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