"I am leaving this country now,
and this is what I bring away from it," he continued, taking off his
finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside: "La
Russie, c'est le neant."
Prince Bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest
nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid of not being
believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops. He
meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has
set the clock of peace back for many a year.
He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more
than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy left to the world
by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.
It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,
astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the
East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its existence
will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead)
unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this
_Neant_ making an armed descent upon the plains of India.
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