way. A little light
is better than none when the road is crooked, and the country abounds
in ruts and deep pitfalls. But the lights shed by these institutions
are much obscured by the official glasses through which they shine.
The building of fortifications; the manufacture of gunpowder; the use
of guns and swords; the beauties of rhetoric abounding in the drill
manual; the eloquence of batteries and broadsides; the poetry of
ditching and draining; the ethics of primary obedience to the
authorities, and afterward to God and reason; all that pertains to
rapine, bloodshed, and wholesale murder--the noble art of mutilating
men in the most effective manner, and the best method of cutting them
up or putting them together again when that is done; the horrid sin of
using one's own lights on any internal problem of right or wrong,
religion or public policy, when the emperor, in the plenitude of his
generosity, furnishes light enough out of his individual head for
sixty-five millions of people--these are the principal themes upon
which the intellects of the rising generation of Russia are nourished.
In the primary schools a select and authorized few are taught reading,
writing, and arithmetic, but they seldom get much farther, and not
always that far, before subordinate positions in the army or navy are
found for them. Their education is indeed very limited, and may be set
down as an exception to the general ignorance.

It will thus be seen that the whole system of education has but one
object in view, the maintenance of a military despotism. In this it
would scarcely be reasonable to search for cause of complaint.
Doubtless the acquisition of knowledge is encouraged as far as may be
consistent with public security and public peace. But it is obvious
that under such a system these people can never emerge from their
condition of semi-barbarism. They must continue behind the spirit of
the age in all that pertains to the highest order of civilization.
Science, in a limited sense, may find a few votaries; the arts may be
cultivated to a certain degree; a feeble school of literature may
attain the eminence of a national feature; but there can be no general
expansion of the intellectual faculties, no enlarged and comprehensive
views of life and of human affairs. Whatever these people do must be
subservient to military rule; beyond that there can be little advance
save in what is palpable to the grosser senses, or what panders to the