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of the "Third Section" are still in every one's recollection. In referring to the knouting applied to Bogoljuboff, Vera Sassulitch's counsel gave the following description:

The sufferer whose human dignity is to be insulted knows not why he is to be punished. He thinks indignation will lend him strength to resist those who throw themselves upon him. But he is grasped by the iron grip of jailers' hands; he is dragged down; and, in the midst of the regular

counting of the strokes by the leader of the execution, a deep groan is heard—a groan not arising from mere physical pain, but from the soul's grief of a down-trodden, outraged man. At last, silence reigned again. The sacred act was accomplished!

It was the brooding over such disgrace and affront to which a political prisoner had been subjected in the very capital, by an official whose department is under the Czar's direct control, that pressed the weapon of revenge into the hands of a tender woman—not so much for her own past miseries as for those of a still suffering fellow man.

Trepoff had been attacked by Vera Sassulitch in his own cabinet, in the very midst of his minions. The jury which tried her was composed almost exclusively of Aulic Councilors and suchlike titled dignitaries. Prince Gortchakoff sat among the audience; so did the pick and flower of the upper classes of St. Petersburg. Who could doubt, in presence of the open avowal of the accused, that the verdict would be "Guilty"? Strange to say, even among the officially faultless remarks of the Public Prosecutor there were some curious admissions. "I, for my part," Mr. Kessel said, "fully believe the statements made by Vera Sassulitch. I believe that facts appeared to her in the light in which they have been placed here; and I am ready to accept the feelings of Vera Sassulitch as facts. The Court, however, is bound to measure these feelings, as soon as they are converted into deeds, by the standard of the law." Through the summing up of the Judge there ran a strong vein of interpretations favorable to the accused. "An accused person," he remarked, "could certainly not be looked upon as an infallible commentator on the event with which he or she was connected. At the same time it had to be noted that criminals were to be divided into two groups-those who are led by selfish impulses, and who, there fore, in the majority of cases, try to mask the truth by lying statements; and those who commit an act from no motive of personal profit, and who entertain no wish to hide anything of the deed they have done. You, gentlemen of the jury, are in a position to judge how far the statements of Vera Sassulitch merit your confidence,

and to which type of transgressors she most nearly comes up."

This was a clear hint to any intelligent jury; and the jury of Aulic Councilors were intelligent men. Going over all the details of the case, the Judge made a great many more remarks in the same spirit. The audience, who had frequently cheered the eloquence of counsel to such an extent that the President of the Tribunal had to When the foreman brought in the verdict: "No; warn them, were on the tiptoe of expectation. she is not guilty!" the Hall of Justice—for justice had for once been done-rang with enthusiastic applause. Vera Sassulitch was borne away in triumph.

In the streets, however-and here we come once more upon all the dark and terrible ways of autocracy-there ensued a fearful scene. An attack was made upon the coach in which Vera Sassulitch was to be carried home-apparently with the object of getting her once more into police clutches. There was a clash of swords and a confused tumult. Gendarmes and police broke in upon the mass of people, who wished to protect her. Shots were fired. A nobleman and relation of Vera, Grigori Sidorazki, lay dead in the street. A lady also, Miss Anna Rafailnowna, a medical student, writhed on the ground, wounded. The victim of so much prolonged persecution had herself mysteriously disappeared. Afterward, an order for her rearrest, marked “No. 16," and dated from the Secret Department of the Town, came to light-evidently through information given by an affiliate of the Revolutionary Committee within the police administration itself. This occult connection of sundry officials with the leaders of the democratic or Nihilist conspiracy explains why Government should so often have been hampered in its efforts to suppress that organization.

The verdict of "not guilty," in the case of Vera Sassulitch, has been followed by several similar ones—a strong proof of the sympathy felt among the town populations, at least, with the aims of the revolutionists. Franz von Holtzendorff, a well-known legal authority in Germany, wrote on the case above detailed: "Far more significant than the verdict of the jury is the fact that that verdict, in spite of its contrast to the existing law, has received the approval, as it appears, of the whole Russian press, of the whole of the upper classes, and even of the circles of Russian legists. I have had personal occasion to convince myself that prominent officials of the Russian Empire gave their applause to that verdict." Again, Dr. Holtzendorff said:

In Russia, the feelings of right and justice, which are systematically and artificially kept down and re

pressed, and which have no outlet in public life, concentrate themselves with their full weight in the verdict of a jury. That which the press had no liberty of saying during long years is given vent to in the debates of a court of justice. An accusation is raised on account of a deed which, though punishable as a crime in itself, has been produced and nurtured by a system of administrative arbitrariness and gross ill-treatment that stands morally deep below the deed in question-a system of corruption which can not be attacked legally, nay, which enjoys

all the honors the state can award. And who can

help it if an injustice committed day after day, in

the name of the state, without any expiation, weighs more heavily upon the public conscience than the act of a single person who, boldly risking his or her own life, rises with a feeling of the deepest indignation against so rotten a system of government? It is but too natural, this wrathful utterance of the popular voice, when it declares that a high official, who, trusting in the practical approval of the imperial favor, ordains corporal punishment according to his arbitrary caprice against defenseless prisoners, is guilty of a greater offense than he who feels driven, by a passionate notion of justice, to constitute himself, of his own free will, an avenger of the public conscience. . . . If, in a state afflicted with political sickness, the institution of the jury had fallen so deep as to work with the mechanical certainty of a military court, and to heed nothing but the points of view of jurisprudence, without being touched by the current of moral aspirations, thus merely registering, with Byzantine obedience, the paragraphs of a code of law; such a phenomenon-keeping, as it would, the Government in a dangerous error as regards public life-would be far more reprehensible than that verdict of "not guilty" by which a whole system of government was practically condemned.

The Russian Government system Herr von Holtzendorff, who personally belongs to a very moderate political party, brands as "a system of arbitrary police ordinances, and of the virtual sovereignty of the Adjutants-General of the Czar -a system of administrative deportations, of despotic arrestations, of press-gagging-a swashbuckler's government." Another German writer of some distinction, Dr. Henry Jaques, observes:

Where an absolutist monarch rules in arbitrary manner, without any limits to his power, the jury becomes the only representative organ of a people utterly bereft of all political rights. In such a case, a jury is indeed entitled to speak, before all, the language of the people, the language of its aspirations toward freedom, which must be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its true rights. Even as, in the Iliad, the orphaned Andromache says to the parting Hector-"Thou art now father, brother, and dear mother to me!"-so the Russian people may say to its jury: "You are now legislators, judges, and the source of mercy at one and the

same time to me! In you there reposes the one and all of my political hopes, of my political rights!"

Noble words, but vain hope! First of all, it is not correct to say that Vera Sassulitch had been judged by a jury under a political charge. For political crimes, or accusations, no jury has ever existed under Alexander II. Vera Sassulitch was charged with what government chose to consider a common crime; hence only she was brought before a jury. For political offenders, or what government chooses to regard as political offenders, packed tribunals have always been assigned. Happily, government overreached itself in the case of Vera Sassulitch, feeling too secure in the loyalty of its own Aulic Councilors.

Secondly, no sooner had the trial resulted in a verdict of "not guilty," than Count Pahlen, the Minister of Justice, who thought the jury were, of course, quite a safe one, was dismissed. Thirdly, a ukase went forth, withdrawing from the cognizance of juries even cases of "common crime," when such crime was directed against one of the Czar's officials. Fourthly, fresh regulations were framed for a change of the jury system, as well fense. Fifthly, in the teeth of the verdict given as for the discipline of lawyers acting for the dein favor of Vera Sassulitch, a fresh trial was ordered, to be held in a country town, at Novgorod, as soon as she could be recaptured. Finally, Alexander the Liberal, seeing that all ordinary procedures were of no avail, instituted a state of siege and drum-head law for political offenders over a large portion of his empire.

These are the desperate doings of a despotism maddened by an ever-active host of enemies. It is usually the beginning of the end.

VIII.

If any more proofs were wanted of the "benevolent" character of the government of Alexander II., they might be found in the increase, year by year, of the deportations to Siberia. They are reckoned to be now four or five times more numerous than under the galling system of Nicholas. Political banishments have enormously augmented under his successor. So has the number

of the prescribed loose and vagabond class of ordinary criminals, or suspects, who are frequently whisked off to Siberia-for the sake of clearing

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six hundred persons of the privileged classes are under arrest, to be deported to Siberia without trial. In one of the temporary governor-generalships in the south of the empire (Odessa) sixty privileged persons have

dreaded office had the power of administering the present time, as I am well informed, more than corporal punishment, in secret, to persons of the upper classes, male or female. At the Sassulitch trial, the counsel for the defense made a dark allusion to this practice, which created a deep impression in court. It was a reference to a whipping-machine once in use, and of which some of those present-ladies as well as gentlemen-may have had personal experience. A correspondent has given the following description: The suspected person, who could not be brought to trial, but whom it was intended to castigate, would be invited to call at the office of the Secret Police. After a few moments' conversation with the dread functionary, the floor would suddenly sink beneath the visitor's feet, and he would find himself suspended by the waist, all that part of the body below it being under the floor, and concealed from view. Then invisible hands and equally invisible rods would rapidly perform their duty-the trap-door would rise again—and the visitor would be bowed out

with great courtesy, and go home, carrying with him substantial marks to remind him of his in

terview.

Though this more than Oriental custom has been abolished, enough remains of barbarity to explain why successive chiefs of the hated police Hermandad-Trepoff, Mesentzoff, and Drentelen -should have been the mark of the bullet of popular revenge. A Russian writer says:

A history of the secret doings, of all the horrors and crimes perpetrated by this disgraceful institution, would fill up many volumes, before the contents of which the most sensational novels would

appear tame and shallow. There is scarcely any sphere of public or private life which is exempted from the irresponsible control of this Inquisition of the nineteenth century. The verdict of a court has no value whatever for the Third Section. Not only acquitted political offenders are as a rule transported, administratively, to some distant town of the empire, but even the judges themselves, when they are considered to have passed too lenient a verdict, are liable to be forced into resigning their office, and to be then exiled in company with the very prisoners who had stood before them!

Lest this description should appear to be overdrawn, I may quote from the letter of the St. Petersburg correspondent of an English journal, which is certainly not unfavorable to the government of Alexander II. The letter was written after the recent proclamation of a state of siege. And the writer says:

As proofs and instances, not so much of martial law as of the repressive measures adopted (in many cases by ordinary administrative agency without the machinery of martial law), I may mention that at

been already sent to Siberia without trial, and two hundred persons of this class are under arrest to be category to be escorted that a practical difficulty is judged. So great is the number of persons of this said to have arisen in connection with their deportation. A noble, or privileged person, who has not been judicially sentenced, when sent to Siberia by "administrative process" (as it is called-i. e., by the orders of the Third Section, or Secret Police), must be escorted by two gendarmes, it being against the laws to manacle a privileged person who is uncondemned. It appears that there are not gendarmes enough thus to escort the number of persons to be deported, and the Ministry of Secret Police has, I understand, proposed to get rid of this difficulty by sending the privileged persons fettered like ordinary criminals.... The Third Section, or Secret Police, which is in its proceedings essentially department of the empire. This institution, which extra leges, claims to act independently of any other lays hold of suspected persons, whether justly or unjustly suspected, and consigns them to Siberia at its pleasure, savors more of Asiatic lawlessness than of enlightened European rule, such as it must be the desire of all in authority to see established throughout the empire. . . . I have myself met with respectable, honorable men who have been arrested and imprisoned, in some cases for a few weeks, in other cases during months, followed by years of exile in Siberia, without any charge being brought against them ; and it is the possibility of this recurring to them, or to others, that constitutes a Reign of Terror.

The above description is from the correspondent of the "Daily News." Clearly it is a very pleasant position to be a "privileged person” in Russia. It marks its occupant, by preference, as a possible candidate for exile to Siberia; the more cultivated classes being essentially those which constitute the active element of political dissatisfaction.

Of the treatment of political exiles in Siberia, as it has been carried on for a long time past, I have before me a thrilling description from the pen of Mr. Robert Lemke, a German writer, who has visited the various penal establishments of Russia, with an official legitimation. He had been to Tobolsk, after which he had to make a long, dreary journey in a wretched car, until a high mountain arose before him. In its torn and craggy flank the mountain showed a colossal opening similar to the mouth of a burned-out crater. Fetid vapors, which almost took away his breath, ascended from it.

Pressing the handkerchief upon his lips, Mr. Lemke entered the opening of the rock, when he found a large watch-house, with a picket of Cos

sacks. Having shown his papers of legitimation, he was conducted by a guide through a long, very dark, and narrow corridor, which, judging from its sloping descent, led down into some unknown depth. In spite of his good fur, the visitor felt extremely cold. After a walk of some ten minutes through the dense obscurity, the ground becoming more and more soft, a vague shimmer of light became observable. "We are in the mine," said the guide, pointing with a significant gesture to the high iron crossbars which closed the cavern before them.

The massive bars were covered with a thick rust. A watchman appeared, who unlocked the heavy iron gate. Entering a room of considerable extent, but which was scarcely a man's height, and which was dimly lit by an oil-lamp, the visitor asked, "Where are we?" "In the sleeping-room of the condemned! Formerly it was a productive gallery of the mine; now it serves as a shelter."

The visitor shuddered. This subterranean sepulchre, lit by neither sun nor moon, was called a sleeping-room. Alcove-like cells were hewed into the rock; here, on a couch of damp, halfrotten straw, covered with a sackcloth, the unfortunate sufferers were to repose from the day's work. Over each cell a cramp-iron was fixed, wherewith to lock up the prisoners like ferocious dogs. No door, no window anywhere.

Conducted through another passage, where a few lanterns were placed, and whose end was also barred by an iron gate, Mr. Lemke came to a large vault, partly lit. This was the mine. A deafening noise of pickaxes and hammers. There he saw some hundreds of wretched figures, with shaggy beards, sickly faces, reddened eyelids; clad in tatters, some of them barefoot, others in sandals, fettered with heavy foot-chains. No song, no whistling. Now and then they shyly looked at the visitor and his companion. The water dripped from the stones; the tatters of the convicts were thoroughly wet. One of them, a tall man, of suffering mien, labored hard with gasping breath, but the strokes of his pickaxe were not heavy and firm enough to loosen the rock.

"Why are you here?" Mr. Lemke asked.

The convict looked confused, with an air almost of consternation, and silently continued his work.

"It is forbidden to the prisoners," said the inspector, "to speak of the cause of their banishment!"

Entombed alive; forbidden to say why! "But who is the convict?" Mr. Lemke asked the guide, with low voice.

"This I see," answered the visitor; "but what are the man's antecedents? To what family does he belong?”

"He is a count," replied the guide; "a wellknown conspirator. More, I regret to say, I can not tell you about Number 114!"

The visitor felt as if he were stifled in the grave-like atmosphere-as if his chest were pressed in by a demoniacal nightmare. He hastily asked his guide to return with him to the upper world. Meeting there the commander of the military establishment, he was obligingly asked by that officer

"Well, what impression did our penal establishment make upon you?"

Mr. Lemke stiffly bowing in silence, the officer seemed to take this as a kind of satisfied assent, and went on :

"Very industrious people, the men below; are they not?"

"But with what feelings," Mr. Lemke answered, “must these unfortunates look forward to the day of rest after the week's toil!"

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Rest!" said the officer; "convicts must always labor. There is no rest for them. They are condemned to perpetual forced labor; and he who once enters the mine never leaves it!" "But this is barbarous!"

The officer shrugged his shoulders, and said: "The exiled work daily for twelve hours; on Sundays too. They must never pause. But, no; I am mistaken. Twice a year, though, rest is permitted to them—at Easter-time, and on the birthday of his Majesty the Emperor."

IX.

CAN we wonder, when we see the ultra-Bulgarian atrocities practiced in Russia, that "Terror for Terror!" should at last have become the parole of the men of the Revolutionary Committee?

I will not go over the harrowing details of the events of the last seven or eight months; they are still fresh in every one's remembrance. The only measures that could stay this destructive contest was systematically withheld by the Czar, who will not permit the slightest display of popular sentiments within the lawful domain of representative government. Many years ago a distinguished French writer described the Russian system as "a tyranny tempered by the dagger." Alexander, too, himself is fully aware of this tragic concatenation of events. He is even known to have often, in the very beginning of his reign, expressed a feeling of fear lest his own end should be a violent one, like that of so many of his predecessors. The attempts of Karakasoff

"It is Number 114!" the guide replied, la- and Berezowski have lately been repeated by conically. Solovieff. While strongly condemning the deed

VOL. VII.-23

of the latter, even the Conservative "Standard" felt called upon, by the dangers of the situation at large, to make the following comments, which possess a lasting interest :

It would be well if this painful incident could be disposed of by a homily upon individual wickedness and individual perverseness. Unhappily, it is but too certain that not only the deed itself, but the peculiar circumstances attending it, are closely related with the existing condition of a considerable section of Russian society. We are obliged to add that this condition is closely connected, in turn, with the form of government and the methods of administration that prevail in that country. . . . In spite of the emancipation of the serfs from the condition of territorial slavery, the Russian people have made little visible progress in the acquisition of political freedom. The Czar is still an absolute sovereign; his ministers still remain responsible to no will but his, and their agents have to answer only to their superiors for the manner in which they exercise authority. . . . The sanguine youth of the nation, eager for a career, and burning for activity, finds itself debarred from any course of distinction save that of arms, or that official existence which too often places men in Russia in antagonism to their own country.. The old method of government-of police supervision, of private espionage, of imprisonment, of exile, of political silence—has been tried, and the result is discontent and extensive conspiracy. We fear that even the confession of sensualistic atheism by Solovieff will not prevent his memory from being cherished by thousands of his countrymen. They will forget everything, save his desire to endow them with more freedom. Whatever his faults, they will consider that he perished in their cause,

men....

and what they will be most disposed to blame will be the unsteadiness of his hand and the uncertainty of his aim.

The "Times" also, while pleading for Solovieff's execution, acknowledged the fact of the sway of czardom being rotten to the core, in the following words: "It can not be disputed that whole classes in Russia are penetrated almost to desperation with a sense of social oppression and wrong. . . . A social condition like this is the natural soil in which the brooding temperament which seeks a remedy in assassination is nourished."

When all the safety-valves are closed, nature takes its revenge, and ever and anon occasions the inevitable outburst. Russia is at present under a state of siege from St. Petersburg to Moscow and Warsaw, from Kiev to Kharkov and Odessa. An army of porters, about fifteen thousand strong, must watch the streets of the capital day and night; and policemen are set to watch the watchers. Under General Gurko, the crosser of the Balkans, who is now Vice-Emperor, the last lines of legality have also been

crossed-if the word "legality" applies at all to Russian institutions. He is invested with unlimited powers, in the place of the disheartened tyrant. The very grand dukes are under his orders. Arrests among officers of the army have been the immediate consequence of General Gurko's satrap rule. In several cases, compromising letters and prints were discovered, and executions both of officers, like Lieutenant Dubrovin, and of privates, have followed. The gallows are in permanent activity. But perhaps the most significant feature—and a promising one too—is the order issued, under court-martial law, that in all the barracks a list of the soldiers' arms is to be drawn up, and to be handed over to the police! This is the strongest sign of a suspicion against the army itself; and on the army the whole power of czardom reposes.

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When we hear of the arrest of a Senator, of a Director of the Imperial Bank, of Professors, of the son of the Chancellor of the dreaded Third Section," of the wife of the procurator of a military court, of the nephew of the Chief of the Secret Police, and many other such cases, we are driven to the conclusion that, in spite of its furious acts of repression, the autocratic system has become untenable-that it must sooner or later fall. Like the Roman Emperor, Alexander II. might be glad if revolt had but a single neck. But is it possible for him to imagine that there exists but one party of malcontents? Do not the very arrests just mentioned belie such an

assertion?

of armed resistance.

Conspirators are laid hold of by the Czar's shirri together with men who would not think Despotism is frightened, in fact, by the very shadows on the wall. Even the Slavophil and Panslavist parties—still the ready instruments of aggressive policy - have both become imbued with constitutional ideas that look like sacrilege in the eyes of the PopeCzar. The revolutionists of "Land and Liberty" (Zemlja i Wolja); the Socialist Jacobins who follow the doctrines of "The Tocsin " ("Nabat"); the Nihilists, properly speaking; and the moderate constitutionalists, are all alike the enemies of the present form of government. In some districts the peasantry have risen; and, remarkable to say, the first troop of Cossacks that was led against the insurgents refused to fight them. These are portents whose gravity can not be mistaken.

Ten years ago, when the Napoleonic empire still stood erect, I said, in an article on "The Condition of France," in the "Fortnightly Review":

A mighty change is undoubtedly hovering in the air. There may be short and sharp shocks and coun

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