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It is popularly supposed that if you are familiar with French and German you may travel anywhere in Russia. So far as the great cities and chief lines of communication are concerned, this may be true, but beyond that it is a delusion. The Russian has not, any more than the West-European, received from Nature the gift of tongues.
In my humble opinion, the whole theory is a delusion; but it is held firmly I might almost say fanatically by those who, in opposition to the indiscriminate admirers of West-European and American civilisation, consider themselves genuine Russians and exceptionally good patriots. M. Witte has never belonged to that class.
At the instance of Uvarov, Lilienthal had entered into correspondence with Philippson, Geiger, Crémieux, Montefiore, and other leaders of West-European Jewry, bespeaking their moral support on behalf of the school-reform and going so far as to invite them to participate in the proceedings of the Rabbinical Commission convened at St. Petersburg.
Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of the Latin world on the other.
In fairness to Count Muravieff I must say that he was not quite so black as he was painted in the Polish and West-European Press. He left an interesting autobiographical fragment relating to the history of this time, but it is not likely to be printed for some years. As an historical document it is valuable, but must be used with caution by the future historian.
The other west-European nations would in all probability be found in the league, although so far as regards its work and its fortunes their adhesion would scarcely be a matter of decisive consequence; they may therefore be left somewhat on one side in any consideration of the circumstances that would shape the league, its aims and its limitations.
Among them are to be found nearly all ranks and conditions of men, from the rich magnate, surrounded with the refined luxury of West-European civilisation, to the poor, ill-clad, ignorant owner of a few acres which barely supply him with the necessaries of life. Let us take, first of all, a few specimens from the middle ranks.
During the insurrection of 1861-1863, when they were graciously received as useful allies, they were indefatigable in parading their Polish patriotism. In the Polish Jewish weekly, Jutrzenka, "The Dawn," the organ of these assimilationists, the trite West-European theory, which looks upon Judaism as a religious sect and not as a national community, was repeated ad nauseam.
The administration was thus brought much nearer to the West-European ideal, but some people have grave doubts as to whether it became thereby better adapted to the practical wants of the people for whom it was created. On this point a well-known Slavophil once made to me some remarks which are worthy of being recorded.
And so my little brother Shaw's lament that the true English gentleman has become extinct is comprehensible, as in the entire tremendous herd of the nations of West-European or Anglo-Saxon civilization, ideas are current which every original immediately recognizes as conflicting with the nature of humanity, as hostile to Christ. The term "un-Christian" is with just consistency applied to them.
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