50. No words can convey an idea of the | soon after his accession to the throne, extent to which this system of pillage, four men, dressed as peasants, with both on the public and on individuals, great difficulty succeeded in penetratprevails on the part of those intrusted ing to the Emperor Nicholas, near his with power in Russia; those practi- magnificent palace of Tsarcko - Selo, cally acquainted with the administra- and revealed to him an enormous systion of affairs in Great Britain may ap- tem of dilapidation of the public naval proach to a conception of its magnitude, stores which was going on at Cronstadt, from the strenuous efforts constantly where cordage, anchors, and sails bemaking to introduce the same system longing to the Crown were publicly into the British dominions, when the exposed at the bazaar, and purchased vigilant eye of Parliament and Gov- at a low price by foreigners. Nicholas ernment is for any considerable time instantly ordered an officer with three averted. It is the great cause of the hundred men to surround the bazaar; unexpected reverses or trifling successes and upon doing so, ample proofs of the which have so often attended the Rus- truth of the charges were discovered. sian arms on the first breaking out of Orders were given to prosecute the defresh hostilities. So universal and linquents with the utmost rigour, and systematic had been the fraud of the the imperial seal was put on the dilawhole functionaries connected with the pidated stores; but the culprits were armies, that they were often found, persons of great consideration. In the when they took the field, to be little night of the 21st June following, a more than half the strength which was bright light was seen from St Petersrepresented on paper, and on which burg to illuminate the western sky, the cabinet relied in commencing the and in the morning it was cautiously campaign. When Nicholas declared whispered that the bazaar had been war against Turkey in 1828, he relied totally consumed by fire, and with it on Wittgenstein's army in the south the whole evidence of the guilt of the being, as the returns showed, 120,000 accused. The Gazette of St Petersburg strong; but it was never able to bring made no mention of the fraud, or of the 80,000 sabres and bayonets into the conflagration by which its punishment field and when the army approached had been prevented. the Danube, he found, to his utter dismay, that the wood for the bridges which were represented as already thrown over the Danube, was not even cut in the forests of Bessarabia.

51. Sometimes, indeed, the enormous abuses that are going on are revealed to the emperor, and then the stroke of justice falls like a thunderbolt from heaven on the head of the culprit; but these examples are so rare in comparison with the enormous number of dilapidations which are going on in every direction, that they produce no lasting impression. Like the terrible railway or coal-mine accidents which frequently occur in England, or steamboat explosions in America, they produce general consternation for a few days, but are soon forgotten. Occasionally, too, the malversation is found to involve such elevated functionaries, that the tracing of guilt and its punishment are alike impossible. At a review in April 1826, |

52. As a set-off to this inherent vice and consequent weakness in the Russian empire, there is one most important source of strength which is every day contrasting more strongly with the opposite cause of decline operating in western Europe. Emigration among them is very general: in no country in the world is a larger proportion of the population more able and prepared, on the slightest motive, to locate themselves in fresh habitations. Armed with his hatchet on his shoulder-his invariable auxiliary the Muscovite peasant is often inclined to leave his log-house and his fields, and carve out for himself fresh ones in some distant or more fertile forest. Followed by his flocks, his mares, and his herds, the Cossack or the dweller on the steppes is ever ready to exchange the pasture of his fathers for that of other lands. But there is this vital difference between these migrations and the emi

cept with their hatchets to a neighbouring forest, or their herds to an adjoining steppe.

gration of western Europe-they are internal only; they do not diminish, they augment the strength of the State. From the British Islands, at this time, 53. To this it must be added that an annual stream of 350,000 emigrants, the introduction of the free-trade sysnearly all in the prime of life, issues, tem into Great Britain has already of whom two-thirds settle in the wilds given a very great impulse to agriculof America;* and from Germany the tural industry in Russia, where it is fever of moving has, since the revolu- advancing as rapidly as its rate is detion of 1848, become so violent that clining in the British Islands. As this 100,000 in 1852, and 149,000 in 1853, change has arisen from the necessary left the Fatherland. It is needless to effect of the wealth, civilisation, and say that such prodigious drains, spring- advanced years of the British empire, ing out of the passions and necessities so there is no chance of its undergoing of civilisation, cannot go on for any any alteration, and it must come every length of time without seriously weak-day to evince a more powerful influence ening the strength and lessening the population of western Europe. But the very reverse of all this obtains in Russia, for there the movement is all within; what is lost to one part of the empire is gained to another, and a rate of increase approaching the Transatlantic appears, not on a distant hemi-bours of Russia, † and tripled its value, sphere, but on the plains of the Ukraine and the banks of the Volga. Nor will it for long be otherwise, for the remote situation of the Russian peasants renders them ignorant of other countries. and averse to the sea; while their poverty precludes them from moving, ex-long to exercise a powerful influence

on the relative strength and fortunes of the two empires. Even before the free-trade system had been two years established in Great Britain, it had, despite the rude system of agriculture there prevalent, nearly doubled the exportation of grain from the har

while it has caused the production of cereal crops in the British Islands to decline 4,000,000 of quarters. The effect of such a continued and increasing augmentation on the one side, and decline on the other, cannot fail ere

-Emigration Report, March 1853. The annual increase of the births over the deaths is about 230,000; so that, when the emigration is taken into view, there is an annual decline of 120,000 or 130,000 in the entire population. This appeared in the census of 1851. Though the great emigration had only recently begun, it showed a decline in Great Britain and Ireland, taken together, of 600,000 souls since 1845; in Ireland, taken singly, of 2,000,000. -See Census 1851, and Ante, c. 1, § 58.

† EXPORTATION ON AN AVERAGE OF THREE YEARS OF WHEAT, BARLEY, AND

Captain Larcom has reported that the wheat produce of Ireland has declined 1,500,000 quarters since 1845; and the return of sales in the market-towns of England indicates a diminished production of wheat alone in Great Britain of at least 2,500,000 quarters more.

Free trade in England.

55. It has been well observed, that the great difficulty in Russia is, that it contains, in a manner, two different people; the one on a level with the most highly civilised states of Europe, the other, at the utmost, only fashioned to civilisation by the police. The Marquis Custine says, "it contains a society half barbarous, but restrained in order by fear; and though that is by

* TABLE SHOWING THE INCREASE OF RUSSIA SINCE 1462.

no means true of the first people, it is | sports at the magnanimous words of strictly so of the last. The interests, the Czar in praise of Liberal institufeelings, and desires of these two differ- tions; many of them had shared in his ent people are irreconcilable; an im- reception in London, and witnessed the passable abyss separates them. That marvellous spectacle of a free people which the first desires with the most emerging unscathed from a contest, passionate ardour, is a matter of in- from which they themselves had been difference or unintelligible to the other. extricated only by committing their caThe highly-educated classes, acquaint-pital to the flames. Immense was the ed with the society, familiar with the influence which these circumstances literature, impregnated with the ideas came ere long to exercise on the highof western Europe, often sigh for its ly-educated youth of Russia, speaking institutions, its excitements, its free- French and English as well as natives, dom. The immense mass of the pea- associating with the very highest sosantry, the great majority of the trad-ciety of these nations, and contrasting ing classes, repel such ideas as repugnant to their feelings, at variance with their habits, subversive of their faith. The first long for parliaments, elections, constitutional government, a national literature, a free press; the latter are satisfied to go on as their fathers did before them, with their Czar, their bishops, their popes-obeying every mandate of government as a decree of the Most High; desiring, knowing nothing beyond their village, their fields, their steppe. For which of these different people is the emperor to legislate? for the enlightened few or the ignorant many; for the three hundred thousand travelled and highly-polished nobles, or the seventy millions of simple and unlettered peasants? Yet must institutions of some kind be established, legislation of some sort go on; and the great difficulty in Russia is, that the one class in secret desires what the other in sincerity abominates, and what would be beneficial to the former would prove utter ruin to the latter.

56. This great difficulty, by far the most serious which exists in Russian society, was much aggravated after the termination of the war by the feelings with which the officers of the army returned from the fields of their conquest and their fame. In the hard-fought campaigns of Germany and France they had stood side by side with the ardent youth of the Teutonic universities, whose feelings had been warmed by the fervour of the Tugenbund, whose imaginations had been kindled by the poetry of Körner; at the capture of Paris they had seen the world in tran

the varied excitements and intellectual pleasures at their command, with the stillness and monotony, save from phy. sical sensations, of their own fettered land. They saw civilisation on its bright side only: they had basked in its sunshine, they had not felt its shade. They returned home, as so many travellers do, to the cold regions of the north, discontented with their own country, and passionately desirous of a change. These sentiments were dangerous; their expression might consign the utterer at once to Siberia: they were shrouded in silence, like a secret passion in the female heart from a jealous husband; but like all other emotions, they only became the more violent from the necessity of being concealed, and came in many noble breasts entirely to absorb the mind, to the exclusion of all objects of pacific interest or ambition.

57. Ignorant of the spread of passions which were destined ere long to cause the earth to quake beneath his feet, and carried away by the intoxicating incense which the loudly expressed admiration of the world had lavished upon him at Paris, the Emperor Alexander returned to St Petersburg in 1814, after his magnificent reception in London, with a mind set rather on vast projects for the pacification of the world, the extirpation of war, and the spread of the sway of the Gospel in every land, than the establishment of any safe or practicable reforms in his own. His benevolence was great, his heart large, his imagination warm; but his practical acquaintance with men was small,

and he aimed rather at reforming man- |gress of Aix-la-Chapelle in this. Two kind at once by the ukases of despot- important alliances, destined to influism, than putting matters in a train ence materially the international relafor the slow and almost imperceptible tions of Europe, were concluded during growth of real improvement, working this period. The first was the mar through the changed habits and desires riage of his sister, the Grand-duchess of the people. He re-entered his ca- Ann, to the Prince of Orange, which pital after his long absence on the 24th took place when he visited Brussels July, and his arrival, after such mar- and the field of Waterloo in Septemvellous events as had signalised his ber 1815; the second, the conclusion absence, was prepared to be celebrated of the arrangements for the marriage by extraordinary demonstrations of joy. of his brother Nicholas, who has since By an order from the Emperor they become emperor, to Charlotte, Princess were all stopped. "The events," said of Prussia, who is still Empress of Rushe to the governor of St Petersburg, sia, which was solemnised some years "which have terminated the bloody after. From thence he proceeded to wars of Europe, are the work of the Warsaw, where he concluded the arMost High; it is before Him alone that rangements for the establishment of it behoves us to prostrate ourselves." the kingdom of Poland, and left General Zayonchek, a Pole by birth, in command as viceroy. He returned to St Petersburg on 13th December, having, by this acquisition of territory and family alliances, extended the Russian influence in a direct line, and without any break, over the whole north of Europe, from the Niemen to the Rhine. Thus was the Netherlands restored to its proper position and rank in Continental affairs; instead of being the outwork of France against Europe, it became the bulwark of Europe against France.

58. He refused the title of "the Blessed which the Senate had decreed should be conferred upon him. His first care was to efface, so far as possible, the traces of the war; his next, to grant a general pardon to all the persons, of whom there were many, who had, during its continuance, been drawn into traitorous correspondence with the enemy. He remitted the capitation-tax to the peasants in the provinces which had suffered the most from invasion, and opened at Berlin and Königsberg banks, where the notes of the Bank of Russia which had been given in payment during the war were retired from the holders at the current rate of exchange. Soon after, he concluded a peace with the Sultan of Persia, by which, in consideration of a very large district of country ceded to Russia, he promised his aid in supporting the son whom the Shah might design for his successor. By this treaty the Russians acquired the whole important country which lies between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and became masters of the famous gates of Derbend, which so often in former ages had opened to the Tartars an entrance into Southern Asia.

60. Consumed with the desire to heal the wounds of war, and convince himself with his own eyes of the necessities of the districts for which succour was petitioned, Alexander gave himself only a few months' repose at St Petersburg. His life, for the next ten years to his death, was more than half spent in travelling, and flying with almost incredible rapidity from one part of his vast dominions to another. The postilions, urging their horses to the utmost speed, carried him over the rough roads of Russia at the rate of seventeen miles an hour: wrapt in his cloak, meditating acts of justice, dreaming of projects of phil59. A full account has already been anthropy, the Czar underwent, for -given of the part which Russia took in days and nights together, with almost the Congress of Vienna, and the ac- incredible patience, the exhausting faquisition of Poland in a former work; tigue. Hardly was his departure from and of the magnanimous sentiments St Petersburg heard of, when the thunwhich Alexander displayed at the Con-der of artillery announced his arrival