So this “world sympathy” exists together with and is strengthened by an ardent nationalism--its natural complement in Dostoevsky’s mind. He never wearies or flags in his protest against those that were at that time called the “Progressists,” that is to say (I borrow this definition from Strakhov), “the generation of politicians which expected the advancement of Russian civilization to proceed not from an organic development of the national character, but from an overhasty assimilation of Western teachings.” “The Frenchman is first and foremost a Frenchman, and an Englishman, an Englishman, and their highest aim is to remain true to themselves. Therein lies their strength.” He takes his stand against the “men who seek to uproot the Russians,” and does not wait for Barrès to warn the young intellectual “who tears himself away from society and disowns it, and does not ‘go to the people,’ but loses himself in foreign parts, in ‘Europeanism,’ in the kingdom of the universal man who has never existed, and in so doing breaks with the people, scorns it and misjudges it.” Like Barrès dealing with “sickly Kantism,” he writes in the preface to the review[24] he edits: “No matter how fertile an idea imported from abroad, it can only strike root here, become acclimatized, and prove of genuine use to us if our national life, spontaneously and without pressure from without, made the idea grow up, naturally and practically, to meet its own needs--needs which have been recognized by practical experience. No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability has been developed to order, on the lines of a programme imported from abroad.” Here follows a remark I regret not to have found in Barrès: “The capacity for separating oneself temporarily from one’s mother-earth for the purposes of self-contemplation, all prejudices apart, is the mark of a very strong personality, just as the power to look on the foreigner with kindly eyes is one of nature’s highest and noblest gifts.” And did Dostoevsky not seem to foresee how this doctrine was to lead and blind us?--“It is impossible to undeceive a Frenchman and prevent his believing himself the most important being in the wide world. Besides, of the wide world he is pretty ignorant. And what is more, he is not keen to be enlightened. This is a characteristic common to the whole nation, and very typical.”