How strange, and yet how natural, that sundered
only by a narrow strip of sea they even now should look back upon all
the laborious, feverish, and overcrowded wealth of Europe and _seeing
the cost thereof_ should feel for it only contempt! For that, indeed,
is actually for the most part the case--though not of course without
exceptions among certain sections of the population.
Or again, the millions and millions of Great and Little Russian
peasants. Big-framed, big-hearted, patient, friendly, with a great
natural gift for association and co-operation, peacefully minded and
profoundly religious; yet superstitious, and capable of rising at any
moment _en masse_ to the call of a great crusade or "holy war"; it might
seem that they hold all Western Europe in the hollow of their hands.
Indeed they constitute not only a hope and promise of deliverance to our
modern world, but also a considerable danger. All depends on how we
dispose ourselves towards them. Should the nations of Western Europe
rouse their hatred by chicanery and mean treatment the result might be
fatal. If their flood once began to move, no battle array of armaments
would be of any use--any more than a revolver against a rising tide--the
flood would flow round and over us.
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