Page:The Book of the Homeless (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916).djvu/251

 T devastating war in Europe has robbed the United States of one familiar figure, of one cherished illusion. In the stage setting of the nations, we have long expected Russia to play the villain's rôle. We have depended on her for dark deeds, we have owed to her our finest thrills of virtuous indignation. From the days when Mr. George Kennan worked the prolific Siberian prison vein (our own prison system was not then calculated to make us unduly proud), down to the summer of 1914, we have never failed to respond to any outcry against a nation about which we were reliably misinformed. It was quite the fashion, when I was young, for some thousands, or perhaps some millions of modest American citizens to sign a protest to the Czar, whenever we disapproved of the imperial policy. What became of these protests, nobody knew; the chance of the Czar's reading the millions of names seemed, even to us, unlikely; but it was our nearest approach to intimacy with the great and wicked ones of earth, and we felt we were doing our best to stem the tide of tyranny.

A great deal of this popular sentiment came to us from England, where hostility to Russia was bred of national fear. A great deal of it was fostered by Jewish immigrants in the United States. But the dislike of democracy for autocracy was responsible for our most cherished illusions.

A well-told story like Mr. Kipling's "The Man Who Was" seemed to us an indictment of a nation. Popular magazines cultivated a school of fiction in which Russian nobles were portrayed as living the unfettered lives, and enjoying the unfettered pastimes, of Dahomey chiefs. Popular melodrama showed us the heads of the Russian police department devoting themselves unreservedly to the persecution of innocent