at, if he fails to meet the
heroic needs of the hour, the world is disposed not to reproach him,
but rather to feel pity for the young ruler who has had thrust upon him
such an insoluble problem. His character recalls somewhat that of his
great-uncle Alexander I. We see the same vague aspiration after grand
ideals, and the same despotic methods in dealing with things in the
concrete. No general amnesty attended his coronation, no act of
clemency has been extended to political exiles. Men and women whose
hairs have whitened in Siberia have not been recalled--not one thing
done to lighten the awful load of anguish in his empire. It may have
been unreasonable to have looked for reforms; but certainly it was not
too much to expect mercy!

What one man could reform Russia? Who could reform a volcano? There
are frightful energies beneath that adamantine surface--energies which
have been confined by a rude, imperfectly organized system of force; a
chain-work of abuses roughly welded together as occasion required. It
is a system created by emergencies,--improvised, not grown,--in which
to remove a single abuse endangers the whole. When the imprisoned
forces tried to escape at one spot, more force was applied and more
bands and more rivets brutally held them down, and were then retained
as a necessary part of the whole.

On the surface is absolutism in glittering completeness, and beneath
that--chaos. Lying at the bottom of that chaos is the great mass of
Slavonic people undeveloped as children--an embryonic
civilization--utterly helpless and utterly miserable. In the mass
lying above that exists the mind of Russia--through which course
streams of unduly developed intelligence in fierce revolt against the
omnipresence of misery. And still above that is the shining, enameled
surface rivaling that of any other nation in splendor. The Emperor may
say with a semblance of truth _l'etat c'est moi_, but although he may
combine in himself all the functions, judicial, legislative, and
executive, no channels have been supplied, no finely organized system
provided for conveying that triple stream to the extremities. The
living currents at the top have never reached the mass at the
bottom--that despised but necessary soil in which the prosperity of the
Empire is rooted. There has been no vital interchange between the
separated elements, which have been in contact, but not in union. And
Russia is as heterogeneous in conditi