les, and
shrinks,--how dejected, how prostrate of heart he is before the doom is
completed. Take now the vilest slave, either of the Emperor of Morocco
or the great Czar of Russia. He changes neither tint nor muscle;
he requires no consolation; he shrinks from no torture. What is the
inference? _That slaves dread death less than the free_. And it should
be so. The end of legislation is not to make _death_, but _life_, a
blessing."

"You have put the matter in a new light," said the Czar; "but you allow
that, in individuals, contempt of death is sometimes a virtue."

"Yes, when it springs from mental reasonings, not physical indifference.
But your Majesty has already put in action one vast spring of a system
which will ultimately open to your subjects so many paths of existence
that they will preserve contempt for its proper objects, and not lavish
it solely, as they do now, on the degradation which sullies life and the
axe that ends it. You have already begun the conquest of another and
a most vital error in the philosophy of the ancients,--that philosophy
taught that man should have few wants, and made it a crime to increase
and a virtue to reduce them. A legislator should teach, on the contrary,
that man should have many wants: for wants are not only the sources of
enjoyment,--they are the sources of improvement; and that nation will
be the most enlightened among whose populace they are found the most
numerous. You, Sire, by circulating the arts, the graces, create a vast
herd of moral wants hitherto unknown, and in those wants will hereafter
be found the prosperity of your people, the fountain of your resources,
and the strength of your empire."

In conversation on these topics we often passed hours together, and
from such conferences the Czar passed only to those on other topics more
immediately useful to him. No man, perhaps, had a larger share of the
mere human frailties than Peter the Great; yet I do confess that when I
saw the nobleness of mind with which he flung aside his rank as a robe,
and repaired from man to man, the humblest or the highest, the artisan
or the prince,--the prosperity of his subjects his only object, and the
acquisition of knowledge his only means to obtain it,--I do confess that
my mental sight refused even to perceive his frailties, and that I could
almost have bent the knee in worship to a being whose benevolence was
so pervading a spirit, and whose power was so glorious a minister to