How long this icy-hearted Muscovite
Oppress the region?’…”
(I quote from memory, deprecating caustic correction). But, in spite of anti-Semitic atrocities (are the hands of other nations so clean now? They were foul once), and in spite of the blunders of a rigid bureaucracy, the Russian nation is not necessarily a menace to civilization: it has within it the elements of a wonderful idealism, and whether autocracy may remain, or may not remain, as the outward and visible form of government, the spirit of democracy is leavening the people, and “Holy Russia” has in truth already been sanctified by the blood of her innumerable martyrs—sometimes, perhaps, misguided and mistaken; but offering to the world an example of idealism and self-sacrifice that should surely dispel the nightmare of Russian brutishness.
I may record here, quite irrelevantly, my own fervent wish (irrevocably established at the immature age of twelve years) that Poland, with few of her limbs amputated, should be replaced upon the map as an independent, and again powerful, nation. It was one of my earliest dreams that I should be awakened at the dawn of a wintry day, and urged by a delegation of Polish magnates to accept the one throne of Europe that had been, and still should be, open to conspicuous (and electoral) merit. That wish has not yet been gratified, and candor compels me to attribute it to the delightful influence of the elder Dumas, from whom I derived also my most enduring impressions of St. Bartholomew, Catherine de Medici, Mazarin, Louis XIII, Richelieu, Buckingham, Louis XIV, Louise de la Vallière, d’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, Porthos, and other immortals. India, I confess, held me equally spellbound: for many months I hesitated between the succession to Aurungzebe (why should I now spell the name differently?) and the crown of Stanislaus. That hesitation has been fatal: I am still throneless.
Others may be throneless (the Mills of God grind steadily) before final peace comes to the different warring nations. They have sowed in their various ways, and will reap the ripened
harvests. But how long shall the childish quarrel of country with country be permitted and encouraged by those who should have learnt a little wisdom, in this twentieth century of perpetual miracles? Let us have done, once for all, with petty jealousies and absurd misunderstandings. Let us blot out, without regret and without the least compassion, the evil records and results of insincerity and manufactured hatred. Let us extinguish, finally and irresuscitably, those fires of malice and flagrant nonsense that have been fed assiduously by the fools and knaves of the world.
Nowhere will you find a decent man, emancipated from the leading-strings of prejudice and unafraid of the bludgeonings of militarist authority, who does not condemn the present war, and all wars, as useless, damnable, anachronistic and inexcusable. We have learnt so much, in these later years; we have adventured in strange ways, and silently borne strange reproaches. We have come very near to God, and talked with Him by wireless, remedying the inconsistencies of the prophets and filling in the gaps left blank by the poets. And shall we still be bound by the gibes and gyves of the mediævalists? The Middle Ages served their purpose: but why extend them to the confusion of modern chronology? We have seen God, as no generation before has seen Him. Let us then live, and not die, until the grave be digged, and the night overshadow us at last.
SEEN THROUGH MOHAMMEDAN SPECTACLES
Achmed Abdullah
Although my father was a Muslim of the old Central-Asian school, a Hegirist, of mixed Arab and Moghul blood, he had sent me to England and the Continent for my school and university education. But boys are much more broad-minded than grown-up men, and so my schoolmates and I never worried about the fact that we had different customs, religion, civilization, and atavistic tendencies.