In July, 1790, he again returns to the charge: “Franklin and Washington were great men. None have appeared yet in France, and Necker has only returned to make a wretched figure.... Why, then, does he stay?” This is the question which the _Russ_, the anti-Governmental newspaper, is asking every day in like terms about Count Witte. In August, 1790, he says about the French: “They have settled nothing like a Constitution; on the contrary, they seem to protract everything but violence as much as they can in order to keep their louis a day.” This might be applied not without appositeness to certain of the Bureaucrats here. In September, 1791, Horace Walpole is even more pessimistic. He thinks that twenty thousand men could march from one end of France to the other. But he apprehends the possibility of enthusiasm turning to courage against a foreign enemy. What he disbelieves in is a set of “military noble lads, pedantic academicians, curates of villages, and country advocates amidst the utmost confusion and altercation amongst themselves” composing a system of government that would set four and twenty millions of people free. “This, too,” he adds, “without one great man amongst them. If they had had, as Mirabeau seemed to promise to be—but as we know that he was, too, a consummate villain, there would soon have been an end of their vision of liberty. And so there will be still, unless, after a civil war, they split into small kingdoms or commonwealths. A little nation may be free.... Millions cannot be so; because, the greater the number of men that are one people, the more vices, the more abuses there are, that will either require or furnish pretexts for restraints.” It is plain from the above quotations that whatever contemporary foreign writers thought of the French Revolution there was one thing which they did not think, and that was that the prominent actors in it were big men; or that the whole movement was anything but disgusting and futile. Later, in 1793, Horace Walpole’s horror and disgust, as was natural, knew no bounds. He thinks, moreover, that the proceedings of the French Republicans had wounded the cause of liberty and shaken it for centuries. Now the popular atmosphere of legend that has grown up round the Revolution takes as its keynote a phrase of Victor Hugo’s: “Les hommes de 1793 étaient des géants.” In Russia we have not got so far as 1793. We are still at the beginning of 1789, and it is quite possible that the future Carlyle who writes the history of this period will say the men of 1905 were giants. The Duma will give opportunities for popular tribunes, and apart from and in contradistinction to great orators or tribunes, it may be doubted whether revolutions, while they are going on, ever produce great men. The great men come afterwards.