A clerical detachment in Brittany awaiting the eviction agent of government—their clubs are hidden nearby.
addition to the strength of the Clerical party, and laying on the Government responsibility and difficulties out of proportion to anything that would be gained. Russia has quite problem enough with her Poles, without wanting to reunite, bu an absorption of Austrian territory, two parts of once partitioned and always unhappy Poland, and thus give new life to that national feeling which it has cost so much to subdue. The desire for a partitioning of Austria does not exist with the governments of the other great powers; but violent as are the internal dissensions, most of these differences will be temporarily harmonized before the danger of any development that looks like a recoloring of the map and an absorption into the stronger nationality of Teuton or Slav.
A vast force is wasted in the Austrian Empire by racial antagonism and parliamentary strife. Industry and commerce are kept humbly waiting while parliamentary mobs shriek in a babel of uncomprehended tongues. The whole economic life and development is hampered, and there is little reason to hope for better things. But there is even less reason, I believe, to expect that the political bands which hold these warring elements into an empire will be broken, and that there will be liberated in the very centre of the European balance of power a dozen independent nationalities to make a convulsion that would be as terrible perhaps as the events following the French Revolution.
An ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had had experience in many European courts, once said to me:
“I cannot put too strongly my belief in the solidity of the Government of Russia. Considering its vastness it is the most perfect going machine in existence. I have known Russia many years, and I believe the Government grows stronger rather than less secure. The Government is in the awkward position of having to solve the double problem of advancing and standing still. It desires to advance industrially and commercially, but it must stand still as an autocracy. For it to thus stand still there cannot be too much education. The strongest influences in the empire to-day are on the side of the Government, and those factors are always growing stronger. There will some day, of course, be political12