is devoted to copious extracts from the mandates addressed by their constituents to the deputies of the First Duma; and he is fully entitled to assert that “only a people that has arrived at a high pitch of self-consciousness could have produced such documents as these.” The philosopher, Čaadajev, held that “a day would come when the Russians would find a place in the midst of intellectual Europe, as we already stand in the midst of political Europe; more powerful then by virtue of our intelligence than we are to-day by virtue of our material strength.” The union of Rasputinism at home and Prussianism in foreign policy has sought desperately to hold Russia in shackles and to obscure the political outlook by mysticist theories which scarcely ruffle the surface of reality. The chains are falling from her limbs; have we more to hope or to fear from the lessons which she has in store for us? Surely the “divine despair” which has prompted all classes of the nation at this supreme moment, must command not merely our heartfelt sympathy, but also a calm optimism which not all the uncertainty of the future can quell.
Mr. Alexinsky is already well known by his earlier volumes on “Modern Europe” and “Russia and the Great War”; “Russia and Europe” should be carefully read by the growing thousands who are eager to understand Russia’a relations with the West and to play their part in strengthening them still further. We can only hope that Professor Masaryk’s book, published on the eve of the war under the same title, will be translated into English with as little delay as possible. The German edition already occupies the position of the standard book on Russian thought and political philosophy, and is continually quoted by all the foremost German historians and publicists, despite its author’s open antagonism to the German cause. It is a real misfortune that its rich stores of information and critical analysis are only accessible to Russia’s Western Allies in German garb; and the British or French publisher who would undertake its translation would be performing a real service to the Allied cause. In the meantime we hope to analyse its contents in greater detail in future numbers of The New Europe.R. W. S.-W.
The Fate of Austria: Important Italian Comment
The Secolo of Milan, the leading Liberal journal in Italy, appends the following important and probably authoritative comment to a telegraphic summary of a leading article in which the Morning Post recently demonstrated that, as in other respects so in regard to submarine warfare, the relations between Germany and Austria are those of master to slave:—
“Austria is the evident negation of the principle of nationality. As such she has always been regarded as a danger to the tranquillity of Europe by those who recognised in the instability of her internal structure a constant stimulus to her expansive restlessness, that is, to her hankering after aggressive adventures and conquest. Ejected almost entirely from the Italian peninsula by the war of 1859, and corroded by the growing agitation of her Slav peoples in favour of
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