(influenced by Socialist doctrines) will suddenly appear, who will wield power without being depraved by it, and will establish an order of things in which people accustomed to a greedy, selfish struggle for their own profit, will suddenly grow self-sacrificing, and all work together for the common good, and share alike.
But this creed, having no reasonable foundation, has lately more and more lost credibility among thinking people; and is held only by the labouring masses, whose eyes it diverts from the miseries of the present, giving them some sort of hope of a blissful future,
Such is the common faith of the majority of the Western nations, drawing them towards destruction. And this tendency is so strong that the voices of the wise among them, such as Rousseau, Lamennais, Carlyle, Ruskin, Channing, W. L. Garrison, Emerson, Herzen and Edward Carpenter, leave no trace in the consciousness of those who, though rushing towards destruction, do not wish to see and admit it.
And it is to travel this path of destruction that the Russian people are now invited by European politicians, who are delighted that one more nation should join them in their desperate plight. And frivolous Russians urge us to follow this path, considering it much easier and simpler, instead of thinking with their own heads, slavishly to imitate what the Western nations did centuries ago, before they knew whither it would lead.
VIII.
Submission to violence brought both the Eastern nations (who continue to submit to their depraved oppressors) and Western nations (who have spread power and its accompanying depravity among the masses of the people) not only to great misfortunes, but also to an unavoidable collision between the Western and Eastern nations; which now threatens them both with still greater calamities.
