No one -- Czar or
diplomat, Kaiser or Mikado -- seemed to know anything. Through
individual Russians one could always see with ease, for their
diplomacy never suggested depth; and perhaps Hay protected
Cassini for the very reason that Cassini could not disguise an
emotion, and never failed to betray that, in setting the enormous
bulk of Russian inertia to roll over China, he regretted
infinitely that he should have to roll it over Hay too. He would
almost rather have rolled it over de Witte and Lamsdorf. His
political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed in
the single idea that Russia must fatally roll -- must, by her
irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way.
For Hay and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the
fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American
intensity. When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she
absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race
which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to
convert, into any Western equivalent. In 1903 Hay saw Russia
knocking away the last blocks that held back the launch of this
huge mass into the China Sea. The vast force of inertia known as
China was to be united with the huge bulk of Russia in a single
mass which no amount of new force could henceforward deflect. Had
the Russian Government, with the sharpest sense of enlightenment,
employed scores of de Wittes and Khilkoffs, and borrowed all the
resources of Europe, it could not have lifted such a weight; and
had no idea of trying.
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