of
office. They shrank from drawing attention to their share of
responsibility in the great calamity, and listened almost humbly to the
suggestions of liberal leaders, suggestions which, a few months ago,
none dared whisper except behind closed doors. A new literature sprang
into life, unrebuked, dealing with questions of state policy with a
fearless freedom never before dreamed of. Conservative Russia had
suddenly vanished under a universal conviction that the hope of their
nation was in Liberalism.

The Emperor recalled from Siberia the exiles of the conspiracy of 1825,
and also the Polish exiles of 1831. There was an honest effort made to
reform the wretched judicial system and to adopt the methods which
Western experience had found were the best. The obstructions to
European influences were removed, and all joined hands in an effort to
devise means of bringing the whole people up to a higher standard of
intelligence and well-being. Russia was going to be regenerated. Men,
in a rapture of enthusiasm and with tears, embraced each other on the
streets. One wrote: "The heart trembles with joy. Russia is like a
stranded ship which the captain and the crew are powerless to move; now
there is to be a rising tide of national life which will raise and
float it."

Such was the prevailing public sentiment in 1861, when Emperor
Alexander affixed his name to the measure which was going to make it
forever glorious--the emancipation of over twenty-three million human
beings from serfdom. It would require another volume to tell even in
outline the wrongs and sufferings of this class, upon whom at last
rested the prosperity and even the life of the nation, who, absolutely
subject to the will of one man, might at his pleasure be conscripted
for military service for a term of from thirty to forty years, or at
his displeasure might be sent to Siberia to work in the mines for life;
and who, in no place or at no time, had protection from any form of
cruelty which the greed of the proprietor imposed upon them. Selling
the peasants without the land, unsanctioned by law, became sanctioned
by custom, until finally its right was recognized by imperial ukases,
so that serfdom, which in theory presented a mild exterior, was in
practice and in fact a terrible and unmitigated form of human slavery.

Patriarchalism has a benignant sound--it is better than something that
is worse! It is a step upward from a darker quagmire of human