nk, otherwise than he approves.
Thousands of them, millions of them, perhaps, are saying to-day, in the
words of Hamlet, "It is not and it cannot come to good; but break my
heart, for I must hold my tongue."

Who is this man, this god of a nation, that he should loom so high? Is
he a marvel of wisdom, virtue, and nobility, made by nature to wear the
purple, fashioned of porcelain clay, greater and better than all the
host to whom his word is the voice of fate? By no means; thousands of
his subjects tower far above him in virtue and ability, but,
puppet-like, the noblest and best of them must dance as he pulls the
strings, and hardly a man in Russia dares to say that his soul is his
own if the czar says otherwise.

Such a state of affairs is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, a
hideous relic of the barbarism and anarchy of mediaeval times. In
America, where every man is a czar, so far as the disposal of himself
is concerned, the enslavement of the Russians seems a frightful
disregard of the rights of man, the nation a giant Gulliver bound down
to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted
public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must
continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will
awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in
disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and
dignitaries who are strutting in the pride of ownership on its great
body, the czar tumbling first from his great estate.

This does not seem a proper beginning to a story from Russian history,
but, to quote from Shakespeare again, "Thereby hangs a tale." The
history of Russia has, in fact, been a strange one; it began as a
republic, it has ended as a despotism; and we cannot go on with our work
without attempting to show how this came about.

It was the Mongol invasion that enslaved Russia. Helped by the khans,
Moscow gradually rose to supremacy over all the other principalities,
trod them one by one under her feet, gained power by the aid of Tartar
swords and spears or through sheer dread of the Tartar name, and when
the Golden Horde was at length overthrown the Grand Prince took the
place of the Great Khan and ruled with the same absolute sway. It was
the absolutism of Asia imported into Europe. Step by step the princes of
Moscow had copied the system of the khan. This work was finished by Ivan
the Great, at once the deliverer