Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/13

Rh . And even in those who have been to the university, culture is not the same thing as it is in educated men in those above-named western countries, where it rests, so to speak, on a basis of hereditary cultivation going back for centuries. If, then, a sufficiently qualified bureaucracy is now wanting in European Russia, how much greater would the deficiency be in the countries west and south of the Euxine, where several half-civilized races live intermingled, differing in religion and language, hating one another, depending entirely on their governors for the impulse which is to pacify, elevate, discipline, and, in fine, civilize them? Highly qualified men, morally as well as intellectually, are needed to deal with the problems which such countries present. We believe that we send such men to India; but we are able to do so because the class from which they come is, in an old and overpeopled country like this, unusually large. In Russia such men are too few, and they are likely to be still fewer, for at present the tendency of educated youth there is quite away from official life, towards the professions or towards employment under such local authorities as are independent of the central government.

In the dominions conquered by Russia, such as Transcaucasia, everything depends upon the bureaucracy, everything is referred to it, everything proceeds from it. What impulses to civilization are to be given must be given by it, for there are few individual settlers, and they do not affect the country in the least. Now with excellent intentions and considerable efforts, the bureaucracy has so far been able to do but little to improve or develop the later Russian conquests. Order is not yet secure in them, and they are so far from paying their way that they constitute a serious drain on the imperial revenues. They will not pay till they are civilized; and civilization cannot be introduced by ukase. With all this work on her hands it would be folly for Russia to attempt the larger and more difficult task of assimilating Bulgaria, Roumelia, and Anatolia. There are other reasons in the internal conditions of Russia proper why she should refrain from entangling herself with new difficulties. The emancipation of the serfs has raised as many problems as it seemed to solve, and no one can yet say how it may end. Serious reforms in the Church are talked of and likely to be before long undertaken. The finances of the empire, exhausted by the construction of so many railways, which have not yet begun to be remunerative, require the most careful nursing. Moreover (and this is a reason to which the enlightened liberals of Russia attach great weight) the addition of new territories obviously incapable of constitutional government would impede or delay that creation of free representative institutions which is the great and the most difficult question of the future for Russia, and towards which some cautious steps have already been taken. The power of the central government is now felt to be too great, and every extension of the districts which can only be ruled despotically by the central government will necessarily throw more upon it.

It may be answered, Supposing all that has just been urged to be true, it does not follow that the Russian government or people see it to be true. They may not believe in this alleged incapacity to find administrators, or they may think that the same course of aggrandizement which has brought them to their present point of greatness will carry them on with full sails over the difficulties of the future: tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito. Or, even while admitting that the development of their internal resources and the creation of representative institutions is the surest path to prosperity, they may be too much seduced by the brilliant prize that seems to lie within their grasp, too much intoxicated by a sense of their "historic panslavonic mission," to be able to halt when the voices of race and religion call them on.

This is a matter on which no one, no, not a Russian himself, can speak with confidence. The sentiment of a nation, the policy of a government, change from day to day, and change from causes beyond prediction. Two or three remarks