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Panslavism rose to a special branch of literature, and its principal writers were Kollar, Grabowski, and Gurowski. He was in the service of the government, when an ode "to Liberty," written in too bold a spirit, induced Alexander I. to banish him from St. Petersburg. The Emperor Nicholas recalled him, and became his patron.
"The idea of Panslavism had a purely literary origin," observes Sir Gardiner Wilkinson in his book on Dalmatia.
Upon a similar basis will take place the national regeneration of Sclavonic States, and not upon the sacrilegious idea of Panslavism, which means the omnipotence of the Czar. Upon a similar basis shall we see fair Italy independent and free.
The idea of Panslavism, or the uniting of eighty millions of Sclavonians under one banner, was, in its origin, republican and federal, whatever it may have become since. Few words have acquired more diametrically opposite meanings, according as they were uttered by radical or conservative. Hence the confusion, hence the many strange phrases to be met with in the periodical press.
The great measure served to increase the national agitation which was connected with other causes. There had long been an enthusiastic party of "Slavophils," actuated by a strong race-feeling, and eager for "Panslavism," or a union of Slavonic peoples. It was the people in Russia which moved the court, against its will, to go to war, single-handed, with Turkey, in 1877.
Not a soul would have understood the feelings which have allowed Panslavism to be a great practical agent in the affairs of Europe, and which have made talk about "the Latin race," if not practical, at least possible. Least of all, would it have been possible to give any touch of political importance to what would have then seemed so wild a dream as a primeval kindred between Magyar and Ottoman.
In fact, we find in avowed Nihilists and Panslavists, such as Herzen, the fundamental Anarchist ideas present just as much as in Bakunin and Kropotkin, whose Anarchism was superior to their Panslavism.
On the other hand, apart from and in opposition to this common political interest, there exists between the two nations a strong racial antagonism. The Russian temperament is radically opposed to the German. The one expresses itself in Panslavism, the other in Pangermanism.
A variant of Slavophilism is Panslavism, which works for the day when all members of one great Slav race will be united in one nation, presumably under the Russian crown. Both these movements are examples of that nationalism run mad to which reference has been made in the second chapter.
Nor have the statesmen of France failed to threaten Germany with a Russo-Gallic alliance in the spirit of the Erfurt congress of 1808; while Russia perseveres in the prohibitory system so prejudicial to German commerce, attempts to suppress every spark of German nationality in Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia, and fosters Panslavism, or the union of all the Slavonic nations for the subjection of the world, among the Slavonian subjects of Austria in Hungaria and Bohemia.
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