Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/145

 CHAPTER XI

MET in society many who were much imbued with the idea of a constitution, and even of a Republic, a word which sounded like magic to them—magic, like something far off. They reminded me both by their advanced ideas and by their occasional indifference of the spirit about which I had often read: of the spirit that must have reigned at the Court of France on the eve of the Great Revolution. The Russian Empire, composed as it is of a number of races so diversely opposed to one another—neither sharing the same sentiments nor possessing any interest in common, races between which even a certain animosity exists always, an enormous population of uneducated, half savage people—would render, it seems to me, a Republic out of the question. I wrote of this twelve years ago!

Many an illusion has already taken wings at the sight of what is passing now, and of that which is bound to come. In the future we may not see the Great Republic dreamt of by Kerensky and others, but rather the destruction of Great Russia itself, and a collection of little republics springing up, small not by the narrowness of the confines of such, but by the weakness of their constitutions, which shall be 2em