At first brutal barbarism, then crude superstition, then cruel and degrading foreign domination, the spirit of which was inherited by our national rulers – such is the sad history of our youth… Now I ask you, where are our sages, our thinkers? Who has ever done the thinking for us? Who thinks for us today? And yet, situated between the two great divisions of the world, between East and West, with one elbow resting on China and the other on Germany, we ought to have united in us the two principles of intellectual life, imagination and reason, and brought together in our civilization the history of the entire globe. But this was not the part Providence assigned to us. Far from it; she seems to have taken no interest in our destiny…. You would think, looking at us, that the general law of humanity has been revoked in our case. Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, taught the world nothing; we have not added a single idea to the fund of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit, andwe have disfigured everything we have taken of that progress . . .We have never taken the trouble to invent anything ourselves,while from the inventions of otherswe have adopted only the deceptive appearances and useless luxuries.