'He is so far off--and there are men alive still who were alive when
Bismarck died!' . . . said the young man....
Section 5
'And yet it may be I am unjust to Bismarck,' said Karenin, following
his own thoughts. 'You see, men belong to their own age; we stand upon
a common stock of thought and we fancy we stand upon the ground. I met
a pleasant man the other day, a Maori, whose great-grandfather was a
cannibal. It chanced he had a daguerreotype of the old sinner, and the
two were marvellously alike. One felt that a little juggling with time
and either might have been the other. People are cruel and stupid in a
stupid age who might be gentle and splendid in a gracious one. The world
also has its moods. Think of the mental food of Bismarck's childhood;
the humiliations of Napoleon's victories, the crowded, crowning victory
of the Battle of the Nations.... Everybody in those days, wise or
foolish, believed that the division of the world under a multitude of
governments was inevitable, and that it was going on for thousands of
years more. It WAS inevitable until it was impossible. Any one who had
denied that inevitability publicly would have been counted--oh! a SILLY
fellow. Old Bismarck was only just a little--forcible, on the lines of
the accepted ideas.
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