In two centuries
of Prussian history, one single revolution--the barricades of 1848--a
bad Berlinish copy of the Paris revolution, and without any result.
Bismarck corrected with a heavy hand so as to crush completely the last
attempts at protest--if such ever really existed. And when his friends
were threatening him with revolution, the ferocious Junker, merely put
his hands on his hips and roared with the most insolent of horse laughs.
A revolution in Prussia! . . . Nothing at all, as he knew his people!"
Tchernoff was not a patriot. Many a time Argensola had heard him railing
against his country, but now he was indignant in view of the contempt
with which Teutonic haughtiness was treating the Russian nation.
Where, in the last forty years of imperial grandeur, was that universal
supremacy of which the Germans were everlastingly boasting? . . .
Excellent workers in science; tenacious and short-sighted academicians,
each wrapped in his specialty!--Benedictines of the laboratory who
experimented painstakingly and occasionally hit upon something, in spite
of enormous blunders given out as truths, because they were their own
. . . that was all! And side by side with such patient laboriosity, really
worthy of respect--what charlatanism! What great names exploited as a
shop sample! How many sages turned into proprietors of sanatoriums!
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