Having successfully weathered the most terrible financial
crises, and having healed in half a century the wounds of two great
wars which she had lost, Austria-Hungary lived in the effort of
holding together Germans, Magyars, Slavs and Italians without their
flying at each others' throats. Time will show how the effort of
Austria-Hungary has not been lost for civilization.
Russia represented the largest empire which has ever been in
existence, and in spite of its defective political regime was daily
progressing. Perhaps for the first time in history an immense empire
of twenty-one millions and a half of square kilometres, eighty-four
times the size of Italy, almost three times as large as the United
States of America, was ruled by a single man. From the Baltic to
the Yellow Sea, from Finland to the Caucasus, one law and one rule
governed the most different peoples scattered over an immense
territory. The methods by which, after Peter the Great, the old Duchy
of Muscovy had been transformed into an empire, still lived in the
administration; they survive to-day in the Bolshevist organization,
which represents less a revolution than a hieratic and brutal form of
violence placed at the service of a political organization.
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