The image was that of the retreating ice-cap -- a wall of
archaic glacier, as fixed, as ancient, as eternal, as the wall of
archaic ice that blocked the ocean a few hundred miles to the
northward, and more likely to advance. Scandinavia had been ever
at its mercy. Europe had never changed. The imaginary line that
crossed the level continent from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
merely extended the northern barrier-line. The Hungarians and
Poles on one side still struggled against the Russian inertia of
race, and retained their own energies under the same conditions
that caused inertia across the frontier. Race ruled the
conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could
tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be
known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound
of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very
existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue,
history was a nursery tale.
The Germans, Scandinavians, Poles and Hungarians, energetic as
they were, had never held their own against the heterogeneous
mass of inertia called Russia, and trembled with terror whenever
Russia moved. From Stockholm one looked back on it as though it
were an ice-sheet, and so had Stockholm watched it for centuries.
In contrast with the dreary forests of Russia and the stern
streets of St.
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