Evening star., 1914-09-27

The timid. the hysterical perhaps are
now asking, what II Germany is De-
| feated? Shall we not be
IL Russia dominated by the
nr.s SlavT'. The conviction
/ Ss' prevails in some quar-
ters that the Slay-that IL to say, the
Russian-is heartless barbarian. and
therefore his success in the present
war constitutes him Q peril The ques-
tion 10 not only suggested by daily
queries from the man in the street. but
particularly by dispatch from Petro-
grad which cites saska Kropotkin as
writing the following:
To say that the present war is a
war against militarism is to be guilty
OF platttude. Yet the attitude on this
subject Of q great number Of people il
extremely curious. For what, II Rus
sia, having helped to crush Germany.
develops a psychology analogous to
that Of Germany after 1870. and after
tasting power decides to become the
greatest of all-fosters the spirit OF
mtlitarism, which we are now arrayed
against?"
| now, M kropotkin hastens to reas-
sure the public by the declaration that
Europe succeeds in breaking the
| bonds of militarism the first to benefit
by the change will be Germany her.
sell; An. And he recalls what Bebel has
said: Behind every war OF the. future
there turks revolution" x
Bebeis forecast. it should be said.
was taken inversely by many. It wAs
said that If Germany declared war the
socialists would refuse to: vote the
q n r1d
ed war there would be revolution;
that If England declared war there
would be disorder, q general strike
j and an Irish rebeikon,@ and nrally II
russia declared war there would be
renewed revolution and anarchy at
I Petersburg. ..!i-s:...--s
War has been declared in Europe
and none of these disorders has de-
yslopsd: M On the contrary: the social
and Irish rebel and bomb-throwang
anarchist-a1l theae alike fell into Nne
as soldiers and are now enthusiastically y
fighting for nag and country.
Mr.. Bernard Shaw Ia cited by NJ.
Ikropotkin as saying: II Germany is
| crushed the balance of power VIII in
cline In favor of Russia, and after that
the situation becomes too horrible, to
contemplate.n%,...
NJ. Kropotkin protests that there is an
other Russia than that conceived by
Mr.. Shaw. Russians" he says, have
sunk their differences and are. showing
united front" What is true Of Rus
| sia appears equally true of all the
lothers: moreover. the car has declared
against militarism. Gen. Kuropatkin
land other Russian authorities an
| nounced months ago that Russia had
above all others that it would be the
Il ruin of the Russian empire. The world
for fact, has changed since Gen.
Skobeleff declared that "the road to
Constantinople lies through. India" y.
X r.
In July. 1903. Mr. Albert Shaw wrote
in the Review Of Reviews: "Some day
/ the desperate Firms, the
Opinions of ambitious Poles. the op-
| A., c, pressed Jews, the nihfl-
sAe 01@s. lists and secret revolu-
tionists and other geographical or So
| cial factors may unite to. bring about
a tremendous convulsion, comparable
only to the French revolution"
The late Mr.. William T. Stead, writ
ing in 1909 of the Slav, said:
The fate Of empires is Of compare
lively small importance when compar-
ed with the destinfes Of races. The his
tory of mankind is largely taken up
with the ephemeral. The rise and fall
| of dynasttes, the rearrangement of the
political confguration of the map.
these things are easy to discern. but
| the evolution Of races goes on unheed-
ed And just now in Europe there Is .
striking illustration of this besetting
s.1. Of the historian Journalists OF Or
Mr. Stead concluded that the Slav was
looming into his kingdom and that the
fortunes of kings and emperors are as
dust In the balance. The hrst- act in
| the drama, the annexation of Bosnia
and herzegovina, had not yet been
| consummated when Mr.. Stead wrote OF
| "the arrival of the Slav." Least Of all
there was no war cloud that constituted
| a serious danger. -
The Slav from an clinical point of
view belongs to the Indo-European
| race. He does not represent particu-
lar type because mixed with the ele-
| ments under which he has lived. The
| Russian Slav is allied to the Firms and
Tartars. the Czechs with Germans, the
| Bulgar with the Touranian. the Serb
| haps in the serbo-Croat that the
best type of the Slav is found.
The principal branches Of the Slav
family are: Russians, little Russians
or r u t h e n n 9,
Branches Of the Poles. czechs.
slav Family. serSs,s1 serbs, slovac'' vac s9 slO-
gar The Slav peoples who have
been accredited with being a peril are
not so at all. On the contrary, the
Christian occidental owes the Slav
debt of perpetual gratitude. Mr.. Stead
said on this point:
Thanks chiefly to the indomitable
stubbornness with which the Slavs op-
posed the Asiatic invaders the west
knows nothing of the horrors of orien-
tai wars. Only those who read the
bloody annals Of the centuries when
the Mongol from the east and the
Turkish invader from the south swept
like desolating wave over the Sla-
vonfc lands can catch faint and far
away echoes of the horrors of those
times. In Spain and southern France
the tide OF western war for time SUBJ
dued the glory Of the cross before the
glitter OF the crescent, but the Arabs
brought civilization in their train"
1t was far otherwise in the Slavonic
lands There the invader brought
neither letters. science nor arts. It
was the superior civilization which
succumbed to the inferior. The Mon
golS were .savages, compared with
whom even the Ottoman Turks were
humane. It is computed by the his
torian that zone Mongol khan. in the
sixty-six years Of his reign. destroyed
in battle or in massacre eighteen mill
lions of human beings"
When the Mongol invasion burst