dinary spirit of secret leaguing in Russia. People are amazed to hear of occult political associations in the new as well as in the older capitals of the Czar's empire—at St. Petersburg, at Moscow, at Kiev-not to speak of Kharkov, Odessa, and other towns of the east and the south. Yet we need not go further back than the first part of the present century, in order to find precedents for secret societies-strong, remarkable precedents, little or scarcely known here, but of deep import for Russia's present and future. There is a conspiratory tradition in the interest of liberalism or democracy even in the ice-bound atmosphere of the northern realm. The events of the present day are but a revival-a revival on a more extensive scale. Now, all history proves that, when a movement thus enters a second stadium with increased energy, the chances of its final success augment, progressively, in a threefold and fourfold proportion.

Germany, too, has had her patriotic and revolutionary conspiracies since the beginning of this century. It has sometimes been said that the open-hearted Teuton does not incline to plotting. As a rule, this is true. As a rule, few nations incline at all that way. Dire necessity only drives them into a secret Bund or a Venta; and then these hidden leagues have their justification in the stress of circumstances. From the days of Armin, the liberator of Germany from the Roman yoke, to those of the Swiss patriots, the peasant unions of the sixteenth century, known as 'The League of the Laced Shoe' and "The Poor Konrad," and down to our times, Germans also have now and then largely resorted to occult organizations of freemen.

They conspired against the Napoleonic yoke with Dörnberg, Schill, and Hofer-and, chief of all, with Baron Stein. They conspired after the restoration of their national independence, when the simplest liberties were denied them by ungrateful princes; hundreds of men distinguished by learning or position-not to speak of the thousands of obscurer patriots-becoming the prey at that time of royal persecution. Again, they conspired before those great risings of 1848'49, which for a while brought the occupants of the thrones down on their knees, and, in spite of the subsequent reaction, successfully did away with many of the worst abuses. Whatever progress Germany has made on the road toward union and freedom has been foreshadowed, prepared, and furthered by secret confederacies like the Tugend Bund; the patriotic Students' Associations (Burschenschaften) which aimed at the restoration of the empire or the establishment of a republican commonwealth; "The League of the Free," "The Association of Germans,"

"The Union of the Proscribed," "The German League of Justice," and kindred brotherhoods. Countless have been the victims of a royal and imperial inquisition which pried by its spies into the patriotic fraternities, and often swept hundreds of members, together with masses of wrongly suspected people, into its widespread nets. But not in vain has been the martyrdom of these men. From a soil fruitfully watered by their blood-from the dreary walls of their ghastly dungeons-from the weary paths of their hopeless exile, many a sweet flower has sprung up, whose bright color and fragrance gladden a generation which knows little of the sufferings of its sires.

The same with France and Italy. There also, the democratic and national spirit, driven in by sanguinary royal reactions, found a refuge, and set up centers of organization, in clandestine folk-motes of freemen, until the moment came when action in the light of day became possible. Cavour himself acknowledged, after his success, "I have been a conspirator my whole life long!" Yet, what comparison could he bear, in that respect, with the apostle of Italian freedom and union, the whilom Triumvir of the Roman Republic, to whom a deeply-rent nation—a “mere geographical expression," in Metternich's contemptuous words-owes the secret organization of that Sicilian campaign which, under the subsequent glorious headship of the Leader of the Thousands, for the first time rendered a united Italy possible!

II.

THE successful precedents of Germany, France, and Italy, have something of a counterpart in Russia. I refer to the conspiracies under Alexander I. and Nicholas, in which men of the highest social rank and of eminent position in the administration and the army, men connected with the Government and the court, noblemen of historic families, and officers whom the Czar had fully trusted, were deeply implicated.

One of them, who has given valuable details of those early movements, I met abroad, years ago.

When I made his acquaintance, it was little expected-though all the rest of Europe was in commotion through popular uprisings against princely misrule-that any corresponding movement could originate in Russia. Ages of uncontested oppression seemed to be before her as her unavoidable lot. For nearly a quarter of a century after his triumph over the insurrection of December, 1825, Nicholas had held the country in his iron grip. It was as if the very soul of the Russian nation were crushed. Fortunately, the mad ambition of that tyrant brought upon him the retaliation of Europe. Striking

out for universal dominion through an attack upon Constantinople-whose conquest has been the secular aim, not of the down-trodden Russian nation, but of a series of her despots, heathen and Christian, ever since the ninth century-he was deservedly foiled; leaving to his successor the legacy of an empire deeply shaken, in which the seeds of dissatisfaction rapidly germinated, though at first in underground darkness.

Many may have forgotten it, some may pretend not to know it, but it is a plain fact that the Crimean war acted upon Russia, in a notable degree, as a liberating solvent. Defeat brought the irresponsible rule of czardom into very serious difficulties. Even as, in 1870, the Napoleonic disaster led to French freedom, so the capture of Sebastopol gave rise to a movement in Russia, which aimed at the introduction of representative government, together with the abolition of serfdom. The new Autocrat-himself, like his predecessors, an extensive slaveholder through his crown-peasants-tried to fence off the danger to his sovereign privilege by suddenly making friends with the serfs. Of this more will have to be said in a subsequent article. Let it suffice to state here that he became a liberator of the mujiks, the better to hold the educated classes in continued political subjection. But it is ill fighting against the currents of the time. After some twenty years of apparent success of this crafty policy, political aspirations once more rise strongly to the surface.

In vain did Alexander II. seek to divert the feeling of the nation from pressing home-questions to glorious military enterprises abroad. In vain he strove to uphold the prestige of success, without which autocracy can not live, at all hazards and at all costs to humanity-committing ruthless barbarities in the Caucasus, in Poland, and in Turkistan, to which further unspeakable atrocities were added in the recent campaign against Turkey. It is all of no avail. In the very hour of his triumph the wall-writing appears which foretells his doom.

I believe there can be no doubt that the unprovoked attack upon the Ottoman Empire-made in the midst of an attempt at a parliamentary reform on the basis of the civil and political equality of races and creeds-had little, if any, support among the liberal, none among the advanced or democratic, elements in Russia. By them it was felt that that attack was the usual device of a hard-driven despotism which tries to get rid of internal complications by bloodletting abroad. Had the Porte been allowed to work out its reforms in peace, Russian liberals would have been able to retort upon their own oppressor by asking him for "freedom as in Turkey," even as French democrats under Napoleon III.

asked for "“freedom as in Austria." The fact of an Ottoman representative government having been established at Constantinople through students' (Softas') demonstrations and popular risings against despotic and incapable Sultans, one of whom was deposed after the other, would have strengthened the hands of the progressive parties at St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. Hence I think-and I do not say it lightly-that the Czar's anti-Turkish crusade was looked upon with deep inward aversion by the more energetic revolutionists.

Still some of them inclined to the belief that, one way or the other, the war would have the effect of shaking the autocratic edifice. In war the rottenness, the corruption, the venality, the inefficiency of the administration, civil and military, would come out. Heavy sacrifices in blood and treasure would have to be made by the people. Dissatisfaction would therefore increase. When death is to be faced, when sufferings are to be undergone by hundreds of thousands, men become bolder in thought and action. A better chance would thus offer itself for agitation among the masses, otherwise so stolid in Russia. The Czar and the Grand Dukes would have to go to the scene of war-to stay there for a length of time, especially if things went wrong. Who knew what might be done in such a case among a mutinous army on foreign soil and an angered population at home?

Victory itself was similarly discounted. After a triumph gained with enormous sacrifices for the alleged deliverance of the Bulgars, the Russians would have a good claim for their own emancipation. If Alexander then refused to the Russian people its right of self-government, as he was sure to do, the revolutionary party would be strengthened. So, whether the Czar vanquished the Sultan, or the Sultan the Czar, or "each did kill the other," every way some gain was hoped for by men whom wild despair had made reckless as to the use of means.

Had England and Austro-Hungary, in alliance with reformed Turkey, made a combined push against Russia, when her weakened forces lay before Plevna, the event would have been hailed with ill-disguised pleasure by the leaders of the secret societies. It would have brought matters to a crisis. The Czar, at that time, dared not return to Moscow lest the demand for a charter should be presented to him on the point of militia bayonets, respectfully arrayed for his reception. It was a great historical opportunity, that long siege of Plevna; but it was lost, so far as English interests are concerned, through divided counsels here.

A year ago a distinguished English statesman, an ex-cabinet minister, who has taken a

prominent part, though generally in a moderate sense, in the discussions on the Eastern question, asked me, in presence of others, Whether, in the case of foreign intervention in the East, there would not have been a great patriotic rally among Russian revolutionists themselves?" I answered, "That, to the best of my belief, an active opposition of European Powers to the war-policy of the Czar would have found allies in Russia, and that the present revolutionary party there must not be judged by precedents taken from other and dissimilar cases."

What has happened since June last is, I think, calculated to show the correctness of this appreciation. The Eastern question is immaterial to the so-called Nihilists. They disliked its being raised; they have no enthusiasm for its results. They use the complications arising out of it one way or the other, according to circumstances. And the majority, albeit by no means holding (as is often erroneously thought) Internationalist or Social Democratic views, would certainly have preferred seeing autocracy put to straits from abroad, in order to get greater elbowroom for themselves within, so as to be able to lift czardom from its base by the parallelogram of forces. This attitude of the Russian revolutionists is to be explained from two considerations which act upon them with major force: First, they feel that the empire is already an unwieldy, overgrown one, which becomes less and less fit for free institutions the more it succeeds in annexing further foreign races whom the Czar plays out against the Russians, or against each other, whenever reforms are called for. Secondly, they know that the widely scattered, ignorant peasantry of Muscovy proper are difficult to reach and to organize for political objects, while in the comparatively few larger towns in which progressive sentiments pulsate Government employs a reign of terror against the freedom-loving class.

In such a situation the Party of Action would have been glad to see Government checked in its conquering career by foreign Powers, thereby disparaged in the eyes of the country, and thus rendered liable to defeat at home. A beaten army is often rebelliously inclined. At all events, it is rather a doubtful instrument for internal repression. For various reasons the "Nihilists would consequently not have objected to a repetition of the lesson given to czardom in the Cri

mean war.

III.

ANOTHER circumstance, connected with the traditional policy of Russian monarchs, is to be taken into account. It is an old and well-kept rule in their state councils that neighboring countries must not be permitted to reorganize them

selves in such a way as to strengthen the impediments to encroachment, or to provoke the envy of the Russian people. Thus Poland was accused of intolerable anarchy, in order to get a pretext for her dismemberment. Yet, no sooner did Poland reform her Constitution in a truly liberal sense than she was charged with being a "hot-bed of Jacobinism" and struck from the roll of nations. In the same way, the intervention of the Emperor Nicholas in Hungary had the twofold object of preventing the Magyar Commonwealth from becoming an even more dangerous stumbling-block to Panslavist advance and a virtual reproach to the continuance of the autocratic system in Russia. Sweden, another parliamentary country, was for a similar double reason robbed of Finland. Against Turkey the scheme of procedure has always been laid down with cynical openness. During the war of 1828'29, Count Pozzo di Borgo, the Russian Ambassador at Paris, plainly wrote in a dispatch that all hesitation of his Government as to whether Turkey ought to be attacked was at an end as soon as the Emperor saw that the reforms just introduced by the Porte would have the effect of consolidating the Ottoman Empire.

The dispatch of Pozzo di Borgo goes on: "The Emperor has put the Turkish system to the proof, and his Majesty has found it to possess a commencement of physical and moral organization which it hitherto had not. If the Sultan has been enabled to offer us a more determined and regular resistance, while he had scarcely assembled together the elements of his new plan of reform and ameliorations, how formidable should we have found him had he had time to give it more solidity, and to render that barrier impenetrable which we found so much difficulty in surmounting, although art has hitherto done so little to assist Nature! Things being in this state, we must congratulate ourselves upon having attacked them (the Turks) before they became dangerous to us; for delay would only have rendered our relative situation worse, and prepared us greater obstacles than those with which we met."

Can anything be clearer? And is there not a perfect counterpart to this Macchiavelism in the arguments mentioned in a dispatch which Mr. Layard sent to the Earl of Derby, under date of May 30, 1877? There we read: “A Russian gentleman observed to me: 'Russia looks upon the establishment of a Constitution and a Parliament by the Turkish Government as an insult and a defiance to her. Their existence would alone furnish us with a sufficient reason to make war upon Turkey. We will never consent to be the only Power left in Europe without constitutional institutions; and as we are not yet

prepared for them, we can not, it is evident, allow Turkey to have them."

Could more convincing proofs be required that it is in the interest of Europe to see Russia thrown into the path of radical political reforms, so that the incubus of an aggressive despotism ever plotting in the dark might be lifted from our part of the world? This European interest coincides with the wish of the most resolute parties at present active in Russia. A change has in this respect come over the dream of her propagandists. Alexander Herzen, who passed for a "revolutionist," worked in his time for the Panslavist cause and for the conquest of Constantinople; pointing out even Vienna as a legitimate object of Russian ambition, and speaking of czars as if they were revolutionary dictators to whom an historical task was given! These strange ideas are often found to underlie his apparently most democratic language. In private, he now and then would avow such views in even bolder words, into which his impetuous character allowed itself to be betrayed on slight provocation. The transition from him to Katkoff, of the "Moscow Gazette ❞—his rival in influence, and adversary in agitation-was therefore not so abrupt as may at first sight appear.

war:

On their part, the present Russian revolutionists are dead against Chauvinism. In one of their organs they plainly said after the recent No longer do we mean to tolerate a rule of satraps, after we have sacrificed more than three hundred thousand lives for doing away with a Government in Bulgaria which was far more humane, far more liberal and honorable than this vile Mongol system which tyrannizes over us. The Russian people will not be so foolish as to permit itself to be led again to the shambles for the sake of foreigners, while its own condition is a far more miserable one than that of the Bulgars, whom the impostors of Moscow had written up as 'brethren' of ours. Does a Russian peasant possess a house and farm similar to those which Bulgarian peasants own? And when had Turkey ever such tyrants as Kleinmichel, Murawieff, Trepoff, or Mesentzoff, who in Russia may be counted by the hundreds? We are the unhappiest people on the earth, and our misfortune is the existence of czardom."

Such was the language of the "Journal of the Revolution" shortly after the stipulations of San Stefano. Since then the secret leaders have seen fit to address themselves more especially to the army in a slightly altered tone. In doing so by an appeal issued a few weeks since they introduced words such as men who have bled for their country always like to hear. The appeal contains the following passages:

There is a power in Russia which might serve

the cause of freedom and hasten its triumph; and this power is the army. It, too, had of late to undergo all the sufferings arising from the prevailing system of government. Can the army already have forgotten what it passed through, and not have untion is a much worse one than that in which the derstood the cause of the evil? Its present condi

Russian army found itself after its return from the coming back, the country under a state of siege and Napoleonic wars of 1813-'15. Then it saw, on the people in misery. Now our soldiers meet with famished peasants, deficits, an enslaved nation, a public exchequer robbed by frauds, schools under the administration of intriguing bigots, and a dominant rule of spies, with whom, through the enactments of the new ukase on the courts-martial for political offenses, even members of the imperial family are now associated. The brave warriors of the Shipka Pass, the sufferers of the crossing of the Balkans, are employed for shameful executions against poor tillers of the soil and starving workTo the officer who escaped from death at the men. terrible attack upon Plevna it may happen that he must shoot down his own sister who perchance takes part in a street demonstration of the discontented population; or that he has to march, in military step, over the grave of his own brother whose body was riddled with bullets in consequence of a denunciation launched against him by an infamous secret police. What a terrible situation! Among the heroes of the Napoleonic wars there were men who could not bear such a state of things. They formed political unions tending to a change of the system of government in Russia. The same, with the necessary modifications required by our own circumstances, ought to be done now within the army if it still counts men of noble heart and of high intellect in its ranks. Now there is a better prospect of success than there was in 1815-25, because now it is not the aristocracy and the officers alone who will act. Sooner or later the despotism that weighs upon us must fall, though the crisis may last a long time and the victims may be many. It depends upon all honorable and thinking men of the army to facilitate

the decision and to hasten the end of the crisis.

These words, containing as they do a characteristic reference to the conspiracies under Alexander I. and Nicholas, mark a fresh departure in the revolutionary propaganda of action. A tradition is here appealed to which had become somewhat obscured in the mind of the younger generation in Russia, and of which but little is known to the general public out of the Northern Empire. In the warfare of parties of action traditions of this kind are valuable. A consciousness of the struggles of the past, a sympathetic remembrance of the bygone champions, an intelligent understanding of the reasons of their temporary failure, are apt to embolden men, to fill their hearts with sacred fire, and to strengthen their confidence in the coming triumph of a

The history of the Russian conspiracies and revolutionary risings of the earlier part of this century may, therefore, well be of interest at this moment. Its importance is all the greater because the doings of the secret leagues of those days, in which so many of the very aristoi of Russia were engaged, show in several respects a wonderful likeness to the procedure of the revolutionary party of the present day. A strong historical side-light is thus shed upon what is going on now.

IV.

BEFORE proceeding to detail the conspiracies whose aim was to establish representative government in Russia in the first part of this century, a rapid glance at the rise and origin of her despotic system may be of use. Thus only can we fully understand the fierceness which nerves men who look back upon the slavery of a thousand years to the most eccentric deeds of desperate resolution.

Mr. Gladstone, in an article in which he spoke of the "ample evidence of a just and philanthropic mind" in Alexander II., once described Russia as "nationally young." No greater historical error could be committed: Russia is an old country; and the tyranny of her rulers is of the most ancient date. Vainly does the eye search for a period of popular freedom in wandering over her imperial annals. From the ninth to the nineteenth century the grim darkness of the long Cimmerian night of her oppression is but relieved, here and there, by a pale star of nascent liberty, whose uncertain glitter, scarcely seen, rapidly vanishes away. At the very time of the formation of the empire we meet with a dire despotism, "born with teeth in its head." And to this hour the same tyranny, only in crueller, more systematic form, holds the nation in an abject thralldom, against which the nobler minds among the better educated classes -before all, the aspiring youth-desperately carry on a desultory warfare.

The earliest chronicles of Russia show us a people subjugated by a foreign warrior sib, called Warangians, who came from the Germanic north. They were Norwegians, Swedes, Angles, and Goths, led by chieftains whose names are all of the clearest Teutonic type. It was Rurik, with his brothers Sineus and Truvor, who laid the foundations of the realm in the ninth century, and gave the country its name and its institutions. Slav, Finnic, and Tartar tribes, dwelling between the Finnish Gulf and the upper course of the Dnieper, were combined by these Teutonic Warangians into a "Russian" king

signified the conquering race, even as the name of France arose out of that of the conquerors of Gaul, the German Franks. To this day thirtynine princely families in Russia assert their origin from the direct male line of Rurik. Among these families are the Gortchakoffs and the Krapotkins, one of the latter of whom recently fell a victim to the Secret League, while another Krapotkin lives as an exile in Switzerland.

The institutions brought over by the RussoNorman war-clan to the great Scythian plain, on which Finns, Slavs, and Turko-Tartars then dwelt, were of a semi-feudal kind. Still, they contained the germs of some of those liberties which we meet with among all early Teutonic tribes. Soon, however, the Russian Grand Princes, feeling little restraint for their lust of power among the easily yielding native races, became so thoroughly despotic as to show no trace of their original character as Germanic sib-heads, or Kunings. The native population at large was held by them in severe subjection. This slavery was turned into an even deeper degradation when Russia fell under the yoke of a second foreign dominion, namely, that of the Golden Horde-a Mongol tribe, whose Khans swayed Russia from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.

The khanate, gradually collapsing through internal feuds, was supplanted by the czardom of Muscovy. Slowly rising on the ruins of the power of the Golden Horde, it continued to govern in the spirit and with the administrative machinery of the Mongols. With the aid of Tartar mercenaries, the Czars broke down the few selfruling communities which had in the mean while grown up in the north-such as Novgorod, the associate of the German Hanseatic League, Pskov, and Tver. Though delivered from the harsh yoke of the Tartars, Russia was not to enjoy any liberty. Her monarchs established everywhere the dead level of oppression. No representative institutions were allowed, by which the nation could make its voice regularly heard. The will of the Autocrat was supreme.

Herberstein, an envoy of the German Empire, who visited Russia soon after the withdrawal of the Mongols, wrote with utter astonishment : "The Grand Prince speaks, and everything is done; the life, the property, of the laymen and the clergy, of the nobles and the citizens, all depend on his supreme will. He knows of no contradiction, and everything appears in him just, as in God; for the Russians are convinced that the Grand Prince is the fulfiller of the heavenly decrees. 'God and the Prince have willed it!' are the ordinary expressions among them. . . . I do not know," Herberstein adds with philosophical sadness, "whether it is the character of the