ealings with thieves that
old timid thought of his, that, if he examined too closely their
thief-tenure, they might examine too closely his despot-tenure.

We have shown this vague fear in Nicholas's mind, thus at length and in
different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key
to his dealings with the serf-system.

Toward his toiling millions Nicholas always showed sympathy. Let news
of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian
majesty, and woe to the guilty master! Many of these wrongs came
to Nicholas's notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to
undermine it.

Opposition met him, of course,--not so much the ponderous laziness of
Peter's time as an opposition polite and elastic, which never ranted and
never stood up,--for then Nicholas would have throttled it and stamped
upon it. But it did its best to entangle his reason and thwart his
action.

He was told that the serfs were well fed, well housed, well clothed,
well provided with religion,--were contented, and had no wish to leave
their owners.

Now Nicholas was not strong at spinning sham reason nor subtle at
weaving false conscience; but, to his mind, the very fact that the
system had so degraded a man that he could laugh and dance and sing,
while other men took his wages and wife and homestead, was the crowning
argument _against_ the system.

Then the political economists beset him, proving that without forced
labor Russia must sink into sloth and poverty.[I]

[Footnote I: For choice specimens of these reasonings, see Von Erman,
_Archiv fuer Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland_.]

Yet all this could not shut out from Nicholas's sight the great black
_fact_ in the case. He saw, and winced as he saw, that, while other
European nations, even under despots, were comparatively active and
energetic, his own people were sluggish and stagnant,--that, although
great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in
Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or
builders, or inventors, but only those two main products of Russian
civilization,--dissolute lords and abject serfs.

But what to do? Nicholas tried to help his Empire by setting right any
individual wrongs whose reports broke their way to him.

Nearly twenty years went by in this timid dropping of grains of salt
into a putrid sea.

But at last, in 1842, Nicholas issued his ukase creating the class of
"contra