“German science,” continued Tchernoff, “has given much to humanity, I admit that; but the science of other nations has done as much.  Only a nation puffed up with conceit could imagine that it has done everything for civilization, and the others nothing. . . .  Apart from their learned specialists, what genius has been produced in our day by this Germany which believes itself so transcendent?  Wagner, the last of the romanticists, closes an epoch and belongs to the past.  Nietzsche took pains to proclaim his Polish origin and abominated Germany, a country, according to him, of middle-class pedants.  His Slavism was so pronounced that he even prophesied the overthrow of the Prussians by the Slavs. . . .  And there are others.  We, although a savage people, have given the world of modern times an admirable moral grandeur.  Tolstoi and Dostoievsky are world-geniuses.  What names can the Germany of William II put ahead of these? . . .  His country was the country of music, but the Russian musicians of to-day are more original than the mere followers of Wagner, the copyists who take refuge in orchestral exasperations in order to hide their mediocrity. . . .  In its time of stress the German nation had men of genius, before Pan-Germanism had been born, when the Empire did not exist.  Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven were subjects of little principalities.  They received influence from other countries and contributed their share to the universal civilization like citizens of the world, without insisting that the world should, therefore, become Germanized.”

Czarism had committed atrocities.  Tchernoff knew that by experience, and did not need the Germans to assure him of it.  But all the illustrious classes of Russia were enemies of that tyranny and were protesting against it.  Where in Germany were the intellectual enemies of Prussian Czarism?  They were either holding their peace, or breaking forth into adulation of the anointed of the Lord—­a musician and comedian like Nero, of a sharp and superficial intelligence, who believed that by merely skimming through anything he knew it all.  Eager to strike a spectacular pose in history, he had finally afflicted the world with the greatest of calamities.

“Why must the tyranny that weighs upon my country necessarily be Russian?  The worst Czars were imitators of Prussia.  Every time that the Russian people of our day have attempted to revindicate their rights, the reactionaries have used the Kaiser as a threat, proclaiming that he would come to their aid.  One-half of the Russian aristocracy is German; the functionaries who advise and support despotism are Germans; German, too, are the generals who have distinguished themselves by massacring the people; German are the officials who undertake to punish the laborers’ strikes and the rebellion of their allies.  The reactionary Slav is brutal, but he has the fine sensibility of a race in which many princes have become Nihilists.  He raises the lash with