Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/57

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DISTRIBUTION OF RACES
41

turn against the Government itself. And not even the Evil One has ever been accused of stupidity.


IV

No, in truth, the explanation is less monstrous. The lamentable recent events are simply the outbreak of what Taine has called "spontaneous anarchy," or the spontaneous generation of anarchy. It is the primitive instinct of race antagonism, fostered by pestilential German theories, the barbarous passions of the mob, which, hitherto dormant and latent, hitherto repressed by the iron hand of Government, suddenly burst out and swept everything before them as soon as that obstacle disappeared. If autocracy or a strong military power did not exist in Russia the massacres of Jitomir and of Odessa would alone suffice to demonstrate the necessity of its existence in the interests of humanity and civilization.

And thus we again have to revert to the same political conclusion: the ethnography of Russia teaches us exactly the same lessons as physical and economic geography the vital necessity of a strong government. It shows the danger, not to say the impossibility, of the