potism with a more passive resignation, the resignation of a Tolstoy so representative of the race. And in no other country has Nature given the lie more cruelly and more emphatically to the noble dreams of idealists. Idealists may dream their dreams, proclaim their systems, and claim their reforms. But the great natural, economic, climatic forces in Russia continue to follow their immovable course, heedless of systems and reforms. It would seem as if the political destiny of Russia had been written not in the book of philosophy, but in the stern and sibylline book of Nature; it has followed the bend of rivers and the curves of isothermic lines; and one guesses its mystery, and one catches its meaning more surely and more easily, by listening to the murmur of forest and steppe than by listening to the most plausible theories of revolutionists.
II
In this connexion, and to illustrate my meaning from the outset, and to indicate what I am driving at, I would like to point out the utter futility and folly of most newspaper comments and discussions on the political situation in Russia. In speculating on the probable course
