"For mercy's sake! For mercy's sake!" Alexander cried, with half-stifled voice, and at last with a fearful yell.

Nicholas, hurrying out from his room, beheld the spectacle before him in deep consternation. When the matter was explained to him, he severely reproved and actually punished his eldest born. "It is not worthy of an emperor," he said, "to call out for mercy!"

This well-authenticated anecdote has been told by writers who expressed the most adulatory sentiments toward the present Czar. It is to be found in Castille's highly flattering biography of Alexander II., published about the time of his accession to the throne. The incident, loathsome as it must appear to every sensitive mind, strikingly paints both the gloom that always hangs about the Russian Court and the kind of education given by Nicholas to his offspring.

The youthful despotic propensities of Alexander may be seen from an account given by another of his admiring biographers, Mr. J. G. Hesekiel. This writer enthusiastically swings the censer before Nicholas as "The Iron Knight of Legitimacy" and "The Invincible Champion of Government by the Grace of God." (I may mention, in passing, that Mr. Hesekiel has done the life of Prince Bismarck into similar adulatory prose.) At the age of fourteen, he relates, the boy prince, Alexander, in going through a state-room of the palace, was respectfully greeted by the assembled high dignitaries of the empire, senators, generals, and so forth. They all rose and bowed before the heir-apparent. The boy's vanity being flattered, he purposely came back several times, expecting the graybeards on each occasion to rise and salaam before him. When he found that they thought they had done their duty by the first salutation, he angrily complained against them to his father. Nicholas, however, blamed the son for his unreasonable exaction. This vicious arrogance of the boy ripened afterward into the haughtiness of the despot, being but slightly mitigated by a naturally melancholy disposition, which sometimes gave the appearance of comparative softness.

Of Constantine, the second son of Nicholas, there is a further characteristic anecdote on record. It is to be found even in publications otherwise marked by servile feelings toward the Court. We all know at what a supernaturally early age

sitions in the state administration or in the army. In Russia, where the "right divine of kings to govern wrong" is pushed to its most logical or illogical consequences, this royal custom flourishes to excess. At the mature age of eight Alexander was appointed Chancellor of the University of Finland. His brother Constantine was nominated in early youth High Admiral of the Fleet. One day Constantine, between whom and his elder brother there was little love lost, had Alexander arrested because he had come on board ship without special authorization. Something of the sentiment of Franz Moor, in Schiller's "Robbers," seems to have animated Constantine in his youth. He was often heard to utter a malediction against the law of heredity. He declared that, being born when his father (Nicholas) was already on the throne, he (Constantine) had a better right of succession than Alexander, who had been born when Nicholas was only a grand duke. He further said that, after the death of Nicholas, he would contend against Alexander with the object of partitioning the empire.

These may seem trifling occurrences-mere freaks of childhood. They would certainly be so regarded in countries where the nation practically possesses self-government, and the crown is mainly an ornamental cipher, or where the sovereign privilege is at least largely circumscribed by the parliamentary power. It is different in an empire like Russia, with its murderous dynastic antecedents. There the personal character of the princely personages is of the utmost importance; for a youthful freak or hideous trick may point to a coming horrible event. In olden times, previous to the Tartar dominion, Russia passed through the so-called Appanage Period of Separate Principalities, when the empire was actually partitioned. The feuds which then tore the various branches of the Rurik family greatly facilitated the Mongol conquest that weighed upon the country for centuries. With the condition of Russia such as it was until lately, and still is for that matter, a bold attempt on the part of a prince second in birth could not be said to be beyond the range of possibility. Even now we hear of a deep estrangement between the ruling Autocrat and the Czarewitch, reaching even to such an extent that for a moment there was an intention of arresting the latter.

Nothing has come of the childish threat of the Grand Duke Constantine, who to this day fills the post of Admiral-General of the Russian Fleet. Still, the incident alluded to has its value. When a whole nation is disinherited from political rights, a younger member of the ruling house,

of violent and ambitious temper, may easily take the idea into his head of altering, by a palace plot, the very basis of the empire for his own special benefit. What looks like boyish play may in time to come turn into a tragedy. These dangers, characteristic of all autocracies, can only be done away with by the introduction of a settled order of constitutional law, conferring the chief power in the state upon representative bodies.

II.

THE death of Nicholas, shortly before the end of the Crimean war, remains to this day enshrouded in darkness and doubt.

His proud spirit had been deeply humiliated by a series of defeats. He who once posed as the arbiter of the destinies of Continental Europe had been beaten, not only by the Western allies, but, before that, even by the Turks singlehanded. He wrathfully avowed that "he had been deceived as to the state of public opinion in England." The messengers of the Peace Society, the language held by the organs of the Manchester school, had emboldened him to try to realize the secular dream of Russian despots -namely, the conquest of Constantinople. The disenchantment he experienced gave even his iron frame a terrible shock. Yet his haughty temper forbade him to entertain offers of, still more to sue for, peace. Those surrounding him, including his nearest by kinship, were afraid of angering the ruthless man by unwelcome counsel. At the same time vague murmurs were heard in society against the absolutistic régime which had led Russia to the brink of utter ruin. From the southern part of the empire, where opinion, since the days of Cossack and Ukraine independence, had always been the most advanced, threatening tales came up of a spirit of rebellion among the peasantry, upon whom the relay duties and other hardships connected with the war weighed most heavily. There was a universal feeling that the removal of Nicholas from this world's stage would be a blessing.

In the midst of this darkening situation men learned that the Czar was slightly indisposed; immediately afterward, that he was-dead. He had only taken a cold; but the illness-as the manifesto of Alexander II. afterward said “developed itself with incredible rapidity." The manifesto added, "Let us bow before the mysterious decrees of Providence!"

Was the mystery a real or merely an apparent one?

Abroad a rumor quickly spread of foul play having once more taken place in the Winter Palace. In the German and the Danish press— for instance, in the Copenhagen "Faedrelandet,"

and the Berlin "National Zeitung" and "VolksZeitung"-surmises were openly uttered that the Russian Emperor had died from poison. Not a few thought he had fallen a victim to a palace plot in the interest of the maintenance of the dynasty which was endangered by his obstinacy. In a medical journal of this country it was shown that the bulletins concerning the course of his illness were, at all events, quite at variance with well-known physiological laws. In a lithographed pamphlet-attributed to Dr. Mandt, the physician-in-ordinary to Nicholas—it was alleged that the Czar, in a fit of life-weariness, had himself asked for strychnine, and forced his physician to prepare it for him. A noted Russian writer, Mr. Ivan Golovin, in a book published at Leipsic about eight years ago,* refers to the statement of this pamphlet. He himself remarks that the reason for the head of the Emperor having been covered up, when lying in state, was, that his features were so terribly disfigured by the poison as to render it advisable to conceal the face.

It is impossible to unravel the truth. This much can, however, be said beyond mere probability, that, if Nicholas had not been suddenly taken away, the contrast between his iron rule at home and his continued defeats on the field of battle would have roused a spirit of rebellion and mutiny very similar to that against which he had to contend in the ensanguined streets of the capital at the beginning of his reign. As it was, men expected that his successor would prove more pliant. The prevailing feeling of dissatisfaction did not, therefore, at first assume a revolutionary shape.

Perhaps it was a consciousness of being surrounded by men who watched him closely which made Alexander II. speak out in rather a peremptory tone in his manifesto of March 2, 1855. Monarchs who fear an attack upon their sovereign privileges often seek to terrify their wouldbe antagonists by bold language. "I hereby declare solemnly," Alexander said, “that I will remain faithful to all the views of my father, and persevere in the line of political principles which have served as guiding maxims both to my uncle, Alexander I., and to him. These principles are those of the Holy Alliance. If that alliance no longer exists, it is certainly not the fault of my august father." The fling against Austria, which had half taken the side of the Western allies in the Crimean war, and the covert reference to Prussia, which had refused making common military cause with Russia, was unmistakable.

So far as public opinion existed then, or could make itself heard in the Czar's empire,

"Russland unter Alexander II.," Leipsic, 1870.

the impression of this manifesto was a highly unfavorable one. Its allusions to the maintenance of the political principles of Nicholas and to the maxims of the Holy Alliance were little relished-all the less so, because there was not a word about coming reforms. Military preparations were continued. The whole country seemed to be destined to become a military camp. No prospects were held out either of the emancipation of the serfs, or of the admission of any section of the nation to a share in the government.

Soon, however, Alexander II. had to alter his tone. The wave of public discontent rising ever higher, while the Russian arms suffered defeat after defeat, peace had to be concluded, and the full stringency of the despotic rule could no longer be maintained. Gortchakoff was substituted for Nesselrode in the chancellorship. At that time this was almost considered progress-so unspeakably degrading was the slavery of the nation, and so apt are men in their despair to catch at a

straw.

Gortchakoff, nevertheless, pronounced the famous saying, “La Russie ne boude pas; elle se recueille!" The old war policy had been scotched, not killed. Scarcely had the army returned from the campaign before Government busied itself with a well-studied plan for a network of railways, not in the commercial but in the strategical interest. With the same object of an ulterior return to the aggressive war policy, Alexander II. sought an interview with Napoleon III. soon after the conclusion of the Crimean war. Piedmont, also, was diplomatically approached in a remarkably friendly manner. England was to be isolated. Revenge was to be ultimately taken against her. Between all these significant though somewhat weak attempts, the new Czar addressed to the marshals of the Polish nobility at Warsaw his threatening words: "Before all, no dreams, gentlemen! . . . If need be, I shall know how to punish with the utmost severity; and with the utmost severity I mean to punish!" (Avant tout, point de rêveries, messieurs!... Au besoin, je saurai sevir, et je sévirai!

Thus the autocratic vein strongly stood out even in this more sickly type of a barbarous autocracy. It is the fashion at present, at least among some who take the name of “philosophical Radicals" in vain when they courtesy before a Machiavellian tyrant, to dwell with admiring pride upon the philanthropic character of Alexander the Benevolent. All the cardinal virtues are his. He is the liberator of the serfs, the deliverer of down-trodden nationalities, the educator and friend of the people-a monstrous paragon of princely perfection. The truth is, that this Czar, albeit lacking the nerve of his sire, has from

early youth shown the full absolutistic bent. Dire necessity only brought him to the accomplishment of some reforms. But the evidence before us clearly shows that in this he acted on the well-known lines of despotic calculation, and that he never did good without the intention of thereby preventing what to him appeared to be the greater evil for his position as an irresponsible autocrat, by the so-called "grace of God."

III.

So deeply shaken was the empire by the events of 1853-56, that Alexander did not dare for several years—in fact, not until 1863—to ordain any fresh recruitment for the army. This necessity greatly diminished the oppressive power of the Crown. At the same time, public opinion showed signs of a threatening unrest. An “underground literature," as it was called, began once more to express the ideas of the better-educated, progressive classes. Among the troops, the "Songs of the Crimean Soldiers," by Tolstoy, an artillery-officer, made a great stir. Count Orloff, then Minister of the Police, wrote to the commanding General in the south that he should silence these rebel songs. The General somewhat bluntly replied, "Please come yourself, and try to silence them!"

Among the secret publications then in vogue there were some political poems of Pushkin, hitherto only known in clandestine manuscript form. Pushkin is often called, with a great deal of exaggeration, the Russian Byron, whereas others will only let him pass as a Byron travestied, wanting in originality, like most of his Russian brother-poets of the end of the last and the beginning of this century. At all events, one of Pushkin's utterances containing the words

"I hate thee and thy race, Thou autocratic villain" does not lack in allusive clearness. Secretly printed abroad, his writings were largely propagated at Alexander II.'s accession. Again, men like Lawroff—who, ten years later, was imprisoned as a suspect, after Karakasoff's attempt against the life of the Czar-had celebrated the advent of the successor of Nicholas with such ironically questionable sentiments as this:

"Be proud, ye Russian men,

Of being the slaves of a Czar!"

Writers of comedies, novelists, delineators of the life of the people, ultra-realistic and cynical describers of the criminal classes, arose in rapid succession, whose tendency, one and all, was to show to what a state of corruption Russian society, from top to bottom, had come under the famous "Champion of Order," the dreaded Nich

olas. That Czar had been in the habit of speaking of Turkey as the sick man. Russia was now shown to be the sick man. Neither did St. Petersburg, Moscow, nor the other chief towns, alone serve as a theme for this kind of semipolitical literature. "Provincial Sketches" also came out in a similar strain. These publications obtained an ever-increasing success among those classes-few in number, it is true-which were able to read. A whole "Revelation Literature" sprang up, dealing with cases of governmental corruption. The censorship could not be upheld any longer against these writers with the strict severity of the previous reign. A beaten absolutism had to do things a little more cautiously; and the watchful eyes of men hitherto treated like slaves quickly found out, with the rapid glance and intuition of the oppressed, that it was safe to "dare it on " a little more than they would have dreamed of doing before the end of the Crimean war. Truly, those Liberals in this country who now denounce that war as a mistake and even a crime, do not know, or do not care to remember, what a relief it brought to Russian Liberals themselves.

Soon after the death of Nicholas, desires, until then only muttered, were publicly expressed for the recall and the amnesty of the martyrs of the conspiracy and the insurrection of December, 1825. Pestel, Ryleieff, Bestujeff-Rumin, and the other leaders, had been strung up on the gallows. Many of those transported to Siberia had died a miserable felon's death in the lead-mines. Brought up in the lap of luxury, they ended like galley-slaves, because they had loved freedom more than wealth and ease. It is reported of one of the political prisoners, a nobleman, that he died in Kamtchatka with a chain round his neck, fastened to the wall. Others had been sent to the Caucasus, which in Russia was long ago said to be "not so much a frontier as a graveyard." There they had fallen in a hateful war against brave, independent mountain tribes, as the unwilling tools of an aggressive tyranny. Still, some of the sufferers were yet alive-among them men of the foremost families of the country. They had to be allowed to come back. They came-mere shadows and ruins of their former selves. But their decrepit condition was the most telling evidence of the infamy of the tyrant who had fortunately passed away.

In the salons of the upper classes these suffering witnesses of a terrible past received lavish proofs of admiration. Men would listen with sympathetic avidity to the tales of horror told by them. All those present at such a gathering made it a point to be profuse toward the martyrs with little attentions such as only women ordinarily receive from the other sex. Thirty years

Count Rostoptchin, the same who ordered the burning of Moscow in 1812, said in 1825 he could not understand that attempt at a revolution. He "could understand the French Revolution, because there the ordinary citizen wished to become an aristocrat, but he could not conceive aristocrats wishing to become simple burghers." That was the version of a cynical though otherwise clever member of the nobility, who was unable to comprehend the spirit of self-sacrifice for noble aims showing itself even among the wealthy and the "noble" by birth. However, had Count Rostoptchin only been capable of feeling the degradation under which the Russian aristocracy itself lies in its relations with a despotic crown, he might, even from his own point of view as a mere man of the world, have found a reason for the uprising of independent characters among men of his own rank.

IV.

THE more cultured and wealthier classes again came to the front as political agitators, at the accession of Alexander. They wanted to throw down the Chinese wall which Nicholas had built around them—if it is not an insult to the Chinese to compare the wall they erected as a protection against barbarism with the barrier set up by Nicholas against Western ideas of culture and freedom. At first, Alexander II. did not hold out any hope of reform. Driven to straits, he busied himself with throwing a sop to public opinion by various small relaxations in administrative matters. They were small enough; and they were given with a niggard hand.

Any one taking a survey of the earlier part of the reign of Alexander II. must see that the `main object of his government was to foil the tendency toward the introduction of parliamentary institutions, which was sullenly but perceptibly making its way among the better educated section of the nation; that, with the view of attaining this reactionary end, he pursued the traditional despotic policy of approaching the lower classes on the one hand, and engaging the country in fresh warlike enterprise abroad on the other. Foiled in Europe by England and France, he throws his armies, after the conclusion of the peace of Paris, with renewed fury upon the Tcherkess tribes. They had long barred the

way of Russia toward Asia Minor and Persia, thereby insuring the safety of India from that side. Now Schamyl, the hoary-headed warriorprophet, is compelled to surrender in his last mountain stronghold. From his lofty Alpine home, which is filled with the renown of his romantic deeds, he is carried a prisoner to St. Petersburg, there to be stared at by the crowd of decorated slaves of autocracy.

With this "pacification" of the Caucasus, the Czar obtained the unimpeded use of the highroad leading into Asia Minor. He then struck a blow against the independent tribes on the eastern shore of the Caspian. With the Court of Teheran he entered into relations calculated to threaten Turkey with a double danger from the Asiatic side, in case of a renewal of war. Again, he enlarged his empire, at the cost of China, by filching territories as extensive as some of the greatest European countries. In what once was Independent Turkistan, his armies overran one khanate after the other, thus coming nearer and nearer to India from the northwest. There is a striking war-picture by Vereshagin, with a pyramid of skulls as its center-a very Golgotha of the horrors of massacre; but Russian monarchs, in their ceaseless career of conquest, out-Tartar the Tartar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in these Turkistan campaigns: “Kill all; spare no age or sex!" Witness also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head of Holy Russia, the magnanimous champion of religion and humanity, made his victorious entry into Plevna,* carousing there jubilantly, while the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two days—a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony.

I have anticipated for a moment the course

"The day and night of the battle passed, and the sufferers received no food or water, and their festering wounds were undressed. The following morning the Russians entered and took possession, and made the day one of rejoicing with the visit of the Czar and the imperial staff; but this celebration of the event, however short it may have seemed to the victors, was a long season of horrible suffering for the wretched, helpless captives who stretched their skeleton hands in vain toward heaven, praying for a bit of bread or a drop of water. Neither friend nor foe was there to alleviate their sufferings, or to give the trifle needed to save them from a painful death, and they died by hundreds; and before the morning of the third day the dead crowded the living in every one of those dirty, dimly-lighted rooms which confined the wounded in a foul and fetid atmosphere of disease and death. It was only on the morning of the third day that these wretched, tortured creatures had been left to their fate, that the Russians began the separation of the living from the dead."-("Daily News" letter from Plevna.)

of events. In glancing at the reign of Alexander II. the eye involuntarily runs over the full panorama of tyrannic outrages. From the time of the wholesale proscription of the Tcherkess and Abchasian tribes to the heart-rending horrors committed against Toork populations and wounded Ottoman prisoners of war, there has been, in his career, a perfect climax of inhumanity. Conferences for the professed humanization of warfare were with him only the hypocritical precursors of fresh barbarities. But it is not necessary to forestall events. Enough was done in the way of atrocities even in the earlier years of his rule.

Between the conquests made in the Caucasus and the annexations on the Amoor or in central Asia, Alexander II. bullied, and at last put down by unspeakably cruel means-even as did his predecessor-the national aspirations of unhappy Poland. Like Nicholas, he kept the road to Siberia alive with the wretched convoys of unfortunate exiles. Even in the Baltic provinces, whence the Russian Government draws so many able administrators, diplomatists, and military leaders, whose capacities might be employed in a better cause, he began a system of persecution against the German population, of so galling a nature that it threatened, in course of time, to alienate that very mainstay of the public administration. The special towns' charters of the Baltic provinces were infringed. The German tongue, hitherto possessing full privileges, was threatened. A process of Russification was attempted-the superior civilized element being pushed and annoyed by the inferior and barbarous one.

These acts of the earliest years of the reign of Alexander II. have to be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the serf-emancipation measure. On his deathbed Nicholas is stated to have said to his son: "Thou hast two enemies-the nobility and the Poles. Emancipate the serfs; and do not allow the Poles any constitution!"

It is impossible, with the mystery which envelops the last days of Nicholas, to know whether these words are authentic. At all events, Alexander did not give back to the Poles the constitution they possessed until 1830. Nor did he grant a constitution to the Russians either. He emancipated the serfs-but not before the principles which had actuated the conspirators of 1817-25 once more began to show themselves among the upper strata of society; and in passing his measure he mainly sought to deprive a restive nobility of some of its influence, and to take the wind out of the sails of those liberal agitators who would have made the abolition