There is an
awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _Neant_--and in
Russia there is no idea. She is not a _Neant_, she is and has been
simply the negation of everything worth living for. She is not an empty
void, she is a yawning chasm open between East and West; a bottomless
abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards
personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling
desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. Those that
have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of Panslavism, of universal
conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for Western ideas, drift
impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that
there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree
serve even the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready
for a revolution. The sin of the old European monarchies was not the
absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to
alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the
march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into
oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions
sooner, perhaps, than any other.
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