The Appetite of Tyranny

The German Emperor has reproached this country with allying itself with
"barbaric and semi-oriental power." We have already considered in what
sense we use the word barbaric: it is in the sense of one who is hostile to
civilisation, not one who is insufficient in it. But when we pass from the
idea of the barbaric to the idea of the oriental, the case is even more
curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except
the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied
and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece,
of Spain and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East she has
suffered in order to resist it: and it is rather hard that the very miracle
of her escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not
have been three days inside a fish, but that does not make him a merman.
And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous
captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type. We
consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.
Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and
patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that Don Quixote was an
African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus. I have never heard that the
heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In
the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognise the resurrection
of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia is
rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can
really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all Russian churches are
"mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even
the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol, as
the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on
the high seas: yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's day. I should
think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half-Danish, merely because
they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence under the
savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilised states of
Christendom; and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries, but everywhere
the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the
cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to say
"Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest hour of the
barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a