Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/213

Rh, who pull the wires, think out the plot and apportion the parts? And will the Russian people be doomed in a national emergency to borrow once more their reforms, their institutions, their whole machinery from their Western neighbours? To this we might reply in the first place that the analogies we have noticed may be easily explained by the fact that the two nations possessed the same political organization—a combination of autocracy and centralized bureaucracy, that both nations have been largely agricultural, and that the intellectual classes have been imbued by the same principles. They may, perhaps, be further explained by some resemblances between the Slav temperament and the Celtic temperament, a certain impulsivness, an absence of self-control, and a predominance of the emotional qualities. In the second place we might reply that, striking though the analogies may appear, they are not fundamental, and do not justify us in drawing out any inferences for the future. So far, in Russia we have only seen the preliminary, the destructive period. Now, destruction is the same in all times and in all places. A building is pulled down very much in the