They waited
and suffered. As they stood they were out of place, and could
never have been normal. Their country acted as a sink of energy
like the Caspian Sea, and its surface kept the uniformity of ice
and snow. One Russian peasant kissing an ikon on a saint's day,
in the Kremlin, served for a hundred million. The student had no
need to study Wallace, or re-read Tolstoy or Tourguenieff or
Dostoiewski to refresh his memory of the most poignant analysis
of human inertia ever put in words; Gorky was more than enough:
Kropotkin answered every purpose.
The Russian people could never have changed -- could they ever
be changed? Could inertia of race, on such a scale, be broken up,
or take new form? Even in America, on an infinitely smaller
scale, the question was old and unanswered. All the so-called
primitive races, and some nearer survivals, had raised doubts
which persisted against the most obstinate convictions of
evolution. The Senator himself shook his head, and after
surveying Warsaw and Moscow to his content, went on to St.
Petersburg to ask questions of Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff.
Their conversation added new doubts; for their efforts had been
immense, their expenditure enormous, and their results on the
people seemed to be uncertain as yet, even to themselves. Ten or
fifteen years of violent stimulus seemed resulting in nothing,
for, since 1898, Russia lagged.
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