TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IT may be useful, while we await the fiat of St. Petersburg as to the continuance of the war, to discuss for a moment the condition of British opinion in regard to the possible, though improbable, peace. The Russians say that British opinion about them and their affairs is worthless, because it is tainted by a preconceived hatred which debars us from even comprehending what Russia wishes or means. That is only one of their many illusions. Our people were, it is true, opposed to the policy of the Czars in respect to Constantinople, because they conceived that, if successful, it would ultimately bar their own road to the East, and thus imperil both their Asiatic trade and their Asiatic dominion. They have long since, however, recognised that in 1854 they, to repeat Lord Salisbury's phrase, "put their money on the wrong horse," and with the Nile Valley in their own hands, they are now inclined to regard with calmness the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and to recognise the truth that no great people can be permanently refused access to open water. Our statesmen are still apprehensive of Russian designs on India, and still too much inclined to forget that if we can evoke a true loyalty in the warrior races of the Peninsula—which, as against Russia, is for religious reasons perfectly possible—any enemy who threatened invasion, even Russia or a reinvigorated China, would be pouring into a lake of fire ; but the people do not hate Russia on India's account. They do not feel the burden on Indian finance, and they are too proudly self- confident of their ability to wage any unavoidable war. In the present war, again, their sympathies are not moved by either hatred or fear of the European power. They are stricken with an amazed admiration for the Japanese, who have in the war displayed precisely the qualities which the British most appreciate, and which they did not expect from any Asiatic people; and they believe that Japan, whatever her future career, will leave the trade of the Far East open to all nations, which Russia would not have done. They, therefore, desire Tokio to win ; but it is from liking for Tokio, not hatred of St. Petersburg, with which as a force they begin to feel a certain solidarity. They perceive clearly that the result of the war neither increases nor diminishes the permanent danger of India ; while they also begin to apprehend that the temporary release of Germany from pressure on her eastern border may end in the development of one of those dictatorships which from the early days of Louis XIV. of France have always produced long wars, and always ended in a call on the people of the United Kingdom to sacrifice themselves in protecting the liberties of the Western world. While, therefore, they wish the Japanese to win, they do not wish, as so many Russian bureaucrats suspect, that Russia should be either " crushed " or "ruined."
The single keen wish of the British people about Russia is that she should be transformed into a mode- rately liberal Constitutional State. Owing to causes which it would take a volume to trace out accurately, the British people, as a body, have a horror of what they believe to be the methods of Russian government, which can only disappear when those methods have been abandoned. They believe that a great corporation, headed, and sometimes restrained, by the Czar of the day, weighs like a nightmare upon a great white people, who, were it reduced to reasonable measure, might become one of the leading peoples of the world. They think that the Russian autocracy is the buttress of despotism throughout the world, and that its extravagant powers are used with a selfish cruelty which to them, accustomed for centuries to personal freedom, seems scarcely human. They read of outrages like those of Kishineff, of massacres like that of Blagovestchensk, and of arrests like those which are now made wholesale of the leaders of the " intelligent " with the kind of pained exasperation with which the lovers of animals read of the vivisec- tions allowed in Continental hospitals. They believe that such things occur in Russia everywhere, and are always owing to deliberate malice on the part of corrupt officials ; and they are for the most part un- aware that the millions upon millions who "abstain from politics" are practically as safe in Russia as in Great Britain ; that much of what seems to them mad oppression—for instance, the treatment of Reservists—is really the product of a system and not of individual will ; that, in fact, Russia is a hundred years behind the age, living, as it were, in the time when they themselves sup- ported the press-gang and hung lads by the hundred for sheep-stealing and small thefts. They attribute the famines, as some writers among us attribute the famines of India, to over-taxation, and do not perceive that half the misery of the Russian peasantry is due to their complete dependence upon the work of agriculture, which in country after country is ceasing to support an ever-increasing population just beginning to be sensitive to the discomfort which was once the lot of all without inherited accumulations. They attribute to despotism what in part is due to unchangeable natural conditions, as well as to a traditional mode of exercising authority ; and hating the despotism of which they see only the worst result—for the autocracy is at least better than the old government of Russia by ever-warring and most cruel little Principalities—they welcome every blow suffered by the State as sure to ameliorate an internal condition the endurance of which they can hardly understand. If the Czars would grant, or could be compelled to concede, personal freedom to their people—we say nothing of political freedom—five-sixths of the British distaste for Russia and suspicion of its rulers would almost instantly disappear. If any reader doubts this, let him ask any man of seventy what, when he was twenty-five, he thought of the Austrian Empire. It was to him the very home of tyranny, where half-civilised soldiers trampled the civilised into the dust, where it was possible to flog women for political offences in the public square, where no man sus- pected of Liberalism was free from the danger of life-long imprisonment, and where the delight of the rulers was to support the horrible petty tyrannies of Italy. Austria became Constitutional, and abandoned Italy; and has Austria throughout the United Kingdom a single enemy now ? The Sovereign has been forgiven, and would be welcomed in London to-morrow with hearty cordiality ; the Austrians are described always as the kindest of man- kind ; and if Austria acquired the whole Balkan'Peninsula, not a word would be said of her "insane ambitions," not a blew struck against her out of jealousy of the grandeur of the house of Hapsburg.
As between the British people and the Russian people, there is no latent hostility whatever. Londoners do not like the arrival of a swarm of Russian Jews, persecuted till they have lost much of their imperfect civilisation, who run down the rate of wages, run up the rent of rooms—already too few—and, in the belief of their angry competitors, never wash, but who are yet acute and industrious, and ready to learn anything that will bring them money ; but they do not hate Russians qua Russians at all. The special Russian defect, the kind of childlikeness which, when they are excited, renders them so imperious and so cruel, is imper- ceptible to our population; personally and individually they are distinctly popular, their literature and art circulate as readily as do those of France, and there is even an irrational disposition to believe in their future develop- ment. Nobody wishes them, as Russians, any misfortunes, nor is there any of that trade jealousy, or dislike born of commercial rivalry, which is for the moment unfortunately felt towards Germans. An entente with Russia, were the Russians once free, would create no animosity, and would, in fact, be regarded with an approval qualified only by the feeling that it ought to include the Japanese, whose popularity is indefinitely increased by the feeling that their heroism and their success are lifting from Russia the leaden and crushing pressure of the old autocracy. The Russian contempt for British opinion as incurably, and so to speak perversely, hostile to them because they are Russians is, in fact, only one of the many evidences that the crystal wall which divides every individual from his neighbour, so that the neighbour's real self is only perceived "through a, glass, darkly," also, and even more lamentably, separates nations.
LORD CITRZON'S RESIGNATION.
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