Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/224

208 in 1906 is fundamentally different. It is this conjunction which made the movement in France so irresistible. Even at the eleventh hour the revolution in France might have been avoided. What made it inevitable was not any pre-existing "logic of events," but a combination of untoward circumstances: the religious war and the schism stirred up by a non-juring clergy, the class war stirred up by the aristocracy, the European war stirred up by the émigrés. Had there been neither religious schism, nor class war, nor European intervention—it is highly probable that a Reign of Terror would never have set in. Once this "conjunction" of events took place, terror was unavoidable, and what is even more important, as Taine himself, the most penetrating critic of the French Revolution, is compelled to admit, France could only be saved by a Reign of Terror. Now, in Russia, the situation, the "conjunction" of events, is absolutely different.

In the first place there can be no religious schism, and therefore no religious war, which in France involved a life-and-death struggle, a war waged with all the fanaticism and horror of a crusade. In Russia the Church is a State