528 SLAVIC LITERATURE 



for the reconstruction of the past evolution of one of the aspects of 

 the Indo-European languages. But Russian is other than that. It 

 is from now on, and will remain in the future, one of the most im- 

 portant, one of the cardinal languages of humanity. In the preface 

 of a justly celebrated book Sir Charles Dilke said that the future 

 was for three languages, Chinese, English, and Russian. Arithmetic- 

 proves his statement; it is something to have the law of numbers, 

 the weight of mass, on one's side. Some fifty millions speak German; 

 some fifty millions speak French; in a few years the number of 

 those speaking Russian will be double that figure. The future of the 

 development of Russian is immense. The vicissitudes of the present 

 war are only an incident. Of what importance are a few thousand 

 square miles more or less to a state that measures its dimensions by 

 halves of continents? 



And the same can be said of the Russian language that Anatole 

 Leroy-Beaulieu, in the preface of the English translation of his 

 book I'Empire des Tsars et les Russes, has written of the Russian 

 power : 



"Whatever the future may bring, whatever the results of the 

 Tsar's policy, domestic and foreign, may be, whether Russia is 

 weakened or strengthened thereby, whether the sovereign's authority 

 is shaken or confirmed by it in the end, one thing is certain, and 

 that is that this huge country will remain, in any event, one of the 

 three or four great states of the globe. It will, in our hemisphere, 

 balance the United States in the other." 



