Great October Series: Remembering the Romanov's...Reactions are equal to Actions

In the early months of 1905...Revolts in the Baltic Regions, Baku, Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions have all shaken the Tsar's rule to its foundations.  Even some of the Tsar's most trusted officials acknowledge with baited breath the Tsar had lost his way.  Dissent is not limited to the workers, peasantry, and others...but from the Tsar's most loyal of subjects...high officials within his government.  In May of 1905 an article appeared in the Quarterly Review followed by another in the National Review; entitled simply "The Tsar"...
Portions of both articles, as written below, reveals evidence of someone with close intimate knowledge of the Tsar, his motives, and actions...below one can read the published articles for oneself; take in the views of a
close associate; come to know, as many Russians did in 1905, the understanding;
                                    "the sun began setting on the Romanov rule"

The End of the Autocracy 
A Severe Indictment of the Tsar
By a Russian High Official

Since Nicholas II dismissed his one statesman, renounced all rational policy and took to governing a sixth of the terrestrial planet as the spirits moved him, events have been literally chasing each other with bewildering rapidity.  Sudden historic changes are frequently confronting us as irrevocable facts, and before we can even guess their significance or gauge their trend they are followed by happenings more fateful still.  Thus it is hard to realize that the autocracy, with no constituent assembly to harm it, is already in its death throes; that the autocrat is a life prisoner, albeit there has been no flight to Copenhagen or to Darmstadt: and that the nation is in intermittent revolution without the stimulus of an August 10.  And those startling events constitute hardly more than the prelude to the drama.  Indeed, we dread to speculate on the scene of blood and fire which may be unfolded to our gaze when the curtain is next rung up on the death dirge of a system and an epoch.

Though Aaron counted upon Jehovah's help and wielded a magician's rod, he could do little more than make calves when the statesman Moses was not at his elbow.  And a Russian autocrat today without a prudent mentor is but a leaf whirled by the wind, helpless and pitiable.  Monarchs in trouble appeal forcibly to the imagination, Nicholas of Russia no less than Charles of England or Louis of France, perhaps even more than they.  No doubt forgiveness becomes a Christian nation, and our people if allowed would gladly forget as well as forgive.  But, unhappily, Nicholas's actions keeps their wounds form cicatrising.  There is no balm for their hurts, no light for their minds, no respite for their souls.  Thus wittingly or unwittingly, with or without moral responsibility, the Tsar is become the one hindrance to the well-being of our people, and every man of intelligence in the land is confronted with the Sphinx question; is it expedient that a whole nation shall suffer for the sake of one individual and if not is it a crime to help the millions at the risk of affronting the one?

Offering up the Life Blood of Others
Nitzschean in tenor, emphatic in form, is the answer given by the Tsar himself:
"Sit ut est aut non sit Russia!"...(let it be as it is, or let it not be Russia!)
And after each massacre of his loyal people, misnamed a battle, he inflates his chest and tells the world that the is undaunted still and will carry on the fearful struggle to the end, bravely sacrificing ever more blood and ever more money.  Bravely? Is it his own blood then?  Ah, no; that the ichor of a race of gods--inviolate and inviolable.  He offers up only the life blood of other scores of thousands of his people to whom his voice is the decree of doom.  And the money he squanders is neither his own nor that of his house, but merely the hoarded milliards of his French Allies.  For the Prince of peace wages war by proxy, and is generous and brave at the expense of others.  But now the proxies are growing tired of their respective parts.  French investors decline the honor of financing the campaign, while our people refuse to supply the food for the cannon.  Not that Russians are grown faint-hearted.  For a real king in a heroic age would have died willingly: for their country or a noble idea...they are capable of laying down their lives today.  But Nicholas II, even at hsi best, fails to inspirit them.  Devoid of faith, they behold him in unlovely nakedness, stripped of the garb of a hero.  No enthusiasm thrills their hearts in response to the blissful smile on his twitching lips as he raises aloft the tawdry image of his heavenly protege, St. Seraphim, devoutly blesses them and solemnly wishes them luck--luck on their journey to a horrible end.  St. Seraphim's blessing!  It might be a curse of Satan's, aggravated by a sneer.  But even the masses are not deceived.  Although benighted they feel in their own dim way that it is not for the public well that they are drafted to Manchuria.  persistence in this war means the material impoverishment of the people and the arrest of its moral and intellectual growth.  And the whole nation is aware of it.  Even to his own dynasty, the interests of which the Tsar takes so tenderly to heart, his action bodes no good; it has already turned his guards into gaolers, and transformed his palace into a prison.  Thus devoid of an intelligible goal--selfish or unselfish--and fraught with direst evils, it can no longer be termed a policy: it is an irrational whim, the plain symptom of diseased will which in an absolute monarch is like the power of Zeus in the hands of a simpleton.  Of this we are nearly all conscious; even ultra-absolutists admit it among themselves; but we stop short of words.

A Monstrosity
Yet there are times when inaction is a crime.  That one man should abuse the power given him for the good of all, and leisurely dispatch hundreds of thousands of his fellows to kill, be killed, and spread intense misery far and wide for a mere personal caprice, is in truth a monstrosity for which there is no name in human language no penalty in human law.  In pre-revolutionary France profound horror was aroused by the tale that returning from the chase the jaded monarch sometimes refreshed his body in a bath of warm human blood.  A gruesome legend!  But one is bound to confess that if it had been literally true the scenes accompanying it would have been less horrible and the results following it less mischievous than some of the deed for which our mild mannered monarch has been allowed to make himself responsible.  We can hardly conceive the maddening pain endured by our wounded soldiers abandoned for days and night to freeze, to famish, to fester to death with no word of comfort from their fellows, or huddled together in filthy trucks like bleeding carcasses of swine and oxen.  To these obscure heroes death; even though aggravated with a few hours' tortures, would have been a heaven sent boon.  Of such martyrs to imperial folly there were whole armies.  And at home people whose name is legion are even now perishing of hunger that one man's notion of personal dignity, repudiated by the bulk of the Russian race, should be realized.  In Eastern Siberia, for example, gaunt famine has begun its work, and bands of peaceful men, women, and children are entering upon their last ordeal  and "dying for the Tsar."

"Dying for the Tsar"
Yet amid their own intense sufferings our kind hearted people felt a lively sympathy for their "Little Father."
Nay, they entertain it still.  For their minds have no poison bags for the storing up of malice to feed late revenge.  Of a forgiving disposition, they are loathe to quench the smoking flax.  It is only when the smoking flax threatens to suffocate them that the instinct of self preservation absorbs the dictates of loyalty, and they trample out the smoldering fibre.  When I first took up the pen to describe the situation; Plehve was at the height of omnipotence, enjoying the fruits of his victory over Witte.  A few weeks later Plehve and his system were savagely blown into the region of history amid semi public rejoicings.  This attitude towards crime, the result of moral aberration, is a misfortune, perhaps the most terrible that has overtaken our people since the war began.  Under normal rule we shall recover from the financial effects of our reverses much sooner and more thoroughly than Europe imagines.  For the recuperative forces of our people are almost miraculous.  But the ravages of the ethical malady will prove less amenable to treatment.  And as yet no remedy is being applied.  On the contrary, the people are being goaded into violence, while terror has almost usurped the place of law.  When Plehve had vanished, the Grand Duke Sergius steered the ship of State, standing harsh and defiant behind the man at the wheel.  He had just flung in the face of our people the base calumny that they had sold their Tsar and their God for Japanese and English gold; in the face of that people whose blood and substance had and his were recklessly squandering.  And a few weeks later Sergius, like Plehve, was ruthlessly, criminally, cut down in the height of his triumph, the nation again looking on without disapproval. Now in the connivance at lawless violence lurks a danger, the insidiousness of which few people realize.  Personally I fear that unless its progress be speedily stayed it may lead to moral paralysis of the nation.  Thus
spiritually as well as materially we are "dying for the Tsar."
For it is he, and he alone, who is technically answerable.  There is now no successor of Plehve, no kinsman of Sergius, to share with him the moral burden.  Nicholas II stands conspicuously alone.  Skillful flatterers indeed he has many, but no helpful friend.  From motives which it would be impertinent to analyze the few he had left him for the time or definitely forsaken him.  Grand Dukes, favorites, Ministers have withdrawn from the partnership once so lucrative now so dangerous, taking elaborate precautions to advertise the fact, urbi et orbi. (to the city and to the world)  Some of them point to the sickly figure of the Tsar and all but cry "Ecce homo", (behold the man)  Almost the first to go was the Grand Duke Vladimir, who, I am told, after the massacre of Red Sunday defended himself in America and English journals.  The responsibility for the shooting, he exclaimed, was not his but that of Prince Vassilchikoff, who refused point blank to obey the humane grand-ducal order to cease firing on the people, and refused with perfect impunity.

The Conversion of a Grand Duke
Next among the runaways from the sinking ship of autocracy is the ambitious Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovitch.  This personage is the one Nationalist member of our Imperial family whose zeal burns for genuine Russian civilization untouched by the contagion of western culture.  He displayed his patriotic hatred of foreigners by organizing the recent raid against their mercantile shipping, and showed his love of Russia by promoting the Yalu concession, which was to have enriched himself and ruined Japan.  "utile cum dulci" (useful and sweet)  The political apostasy of this promising prince was, perhaps, the unkindest cut of all.  For he owed many of the best things he possessed to the Tsar, while the Tsar was beholden to him for many of the pernicious counsels he had received and most of the evil counselors he had trusted.  Married to the sister of Nicholas II, the Grand Duke Alexander used and abused his great but precarious influence to recommend Bezobrazoff and Alexeieff to his imperial brother in law, who, caught in the lime of flattery, allowed these adventurers to ride rough shod over Russia.  But the times have changes, Alexander Mikhailovitch has now become a Liberal, and is bruiting his conversation abroad.  Again, it is known that in his unregenerate days, which have so lately and suddenly ceased, this illustrious personage hated the Jews as Saul of Tarsus hated the Christians.  In this he and Sergius were at one.  But since the Revolution began he has had his Damascus, and the scales having fallen from his eyes, he has found salvation.  He is no longer a militant Antisemite.  God having presumably made the Jews, the Grand Duke is willing henceforth to let them pass for men of an inferior race.  Thus, a few weeks ago, he proposed that in one important point they should be differentiated from convicts, and his friends marveled at his broad mindedness.

Attitude of the Dowager Empress
But by far the most noteworthy sign of the times is the departure of the Dowager Empress herself from the camp of the absolutists, if one may describe thus clumsily her mild assent to counsels prompted by common sense, and her gentile but persevering disapproval of measures which, besides harming the nation, endanger the dynasty.  Whether solicitude for the son, or pity for the people, supplied the motive is a matter of indifference to outsiders: the step was well warranted by both.  This distinguished lady, whose inborn tact and savoir faire have often stood her instead of political foresight, has sorrowfully parted from her son and daughter in law at the most critical moment in their lives.  But Cassandra's prophecies were not more vain or true than hers.  The syren's voice of the wife goes straight to the husband's heart, while the warnings of the mother leave the son unconvinced.  And the wife's exhortations are but the echoes of the son's neurotic visions.  In her naive dreams there is no place for prosaic fears, and her fond ambition is blind to obstacles and to consequences.  It would be rash to criticize without knowing the order of considerations that moved her to turn a deaf ear to the voice of the Dowager Empress.  But it is not easy to imagine any rational grounds on which her own sister reasoning, advising, beseeching, should have been also put out of court without a hearing.  The widowed Grand Duchess Sergius, whose vision long experience has sharpened, and whose motive have been chastened by severe suffering, has over and over again sought to impress upon her crowned sister the fact that there are times when true conjugal affection is more effectually shown by judicious hindrance than by uncritical incentive.  Of the views held by the Grand Duchess few among those who move in inner Court circles are ignorant, and nearly all express surprise that the young spouse, who declined to listen to the warning voices of her sister and mother in law, did not at least inquire into the facts and the motives that prompted their utterance.  But Fate, which itself is sightless, makes a point of blinding its destined victims.

A Victim of Fate
And chief among those victims is Nicholas II.  Our Tsar is one of those typical rulers sent in periods of national transition to peoples fore doomed to be slung into pulling down the tottering fabric of the past.  The mischievousness of such a man's influence is generally in inverse ratio to the lethargy of his people, reaction here being proportionate to action...In Nicholas II it kept pace with the growth of the disease of his will until it reached its present point and became unbearable.  For many years he was characterized by weakness of will, which is now brought into painful relief by a convulsive craving for strength.  The feebleness is evidenced in his chronic state, the fitful force in his transitory moods.
That ailment has been aggravated by injudicious but well meant efforts to cure it.  A soft feminine voice, uttering loving words and bracing exhortations in the language of Shakespeare, stimulated him to endeavors which took a wrong direction.  Nicholas having dismissed his ambitious Minister, the halo of the Tsardom departed from him, and he thenceforward submissively hearkened to the soft, sweet voice in the boudoir.  "Show them that you are a real Monarch, whose word is law.  You have issued your commands, now see that they are executed.  They taunt you with a weak will.  Let them feel its force!"  And Nicholas responded to the stimulus.  For if he lacks the sensitive conscience which wakes the sinner up, he possesses certain of the virtues which lull to sleep, and foremost among them that languid sweetness which enables a husband to celebrate his wedding almost every day of his life.  And it is possibly to the qualities underlying this soft passivity, which the son of Priam combine with personal dash, that Nicholas owes his predilection for the society of women, priests, charlatans, and children, and his shyness of the society of strong, honest men.

Next, the second half of the article on...
The End of the Autocracy
A Severe Indictment of the Tsar
By A Russian High Official

All thinking people are combining against the autocracy.  The engineers were the first to form a permanent association, including every member of the profession in Russia, and to demand a legislative Assembly.  A thunderbolt was hurled against them in the shape of an order forbidding them ever to meet again; for Nicholas II was once more impelled to show himself a real monarch, and to smite with might.  But the engineers, deaf to the echo of the soft voice from within the boudoir, gathered together to discuss politics heedless of prohibitions.  The Government may say what it likes, but we will do what we like, was the meaning of their procedure.  their example was followed by academicians, professors, barristers, men of letters...in a word, by all the groups and sections of thinking, writing and articulate Russia.  The white heat of a generous passion for equity, justice and equality is rapidly fusing all the elements of our people into a nation, one in its opposition to the Tsar, and every day brings fresh examples.  Less than a week ago the members of the outer Bar of St. Petersburg at their general meeting passed a resolution condemning the autocracy in terms of unprecedented violence.  The labor and agrarian troubles, it said, having been "provoked by a policy of injustice culminating in misery and ignorance, call not for coercion, but for a thorough overhauling of our economic relations which the nation alone can effect.  But, unmindful of the well being of the people, and anxious only to uphold its own power, the present Government is swiftly conducting the nation to hopeless anarchy and appalling disaster."
Seraphim of Saroff, whom the Imperial couple had raised to the dignity of a saint, had rewarded their confidence by bestowing upon them a male heir.  Their trust in the spiritism of Phillippe had been disappointed, their belief in the science of Schenk had brought disillusion; but when they confided in the orthodoxy of Serphim their tearful prayer was heard and the Tsarevitch saw the light of day.  therefore the orthodox spirit of ancient Muscovy should quicken autocracy and find adequate expression in the historic State document that was being elaborated.

The Tsar's Manifesto
No one suspected what was coming, and still less through whom it would come.  Thorough preparations were made in accordance with the evangelical principle; let not thy right hand know what thy left hand had done.  And then the thunderbolt was launched.  The critic will doubtless read the Manifesto with the indulgent eyes when he learns that is was the handiwork of a devoted wife, whose wish born thought sere shaped by a loyal seaman.  Prince Putyatin, with the help of Shirinsky Shikhmatoff, actually worte the Manifesto by which the destinies of 140,00,000 human beings were to be decided.  Prince Putyatin and Shirinsky Shikhmatoff!  Who..the English reader may inquire...are they?  Who, almost every Russian would ask, are these wire pullers behind the scenes?
Intelligence, a political writer once affirmed, is requisite in order to write any important State document; but one may say without flattery that the members of the Budoir Council have satisfactorily proved the contrary. They have produced a piece of literature which smells less of midnight oil than of incense.  It might be the work of an under taught, over zealous neophyte.  For a well balanced Christian mind would hardly have begun by belittling the Deity for whom so much is confidently expected.  In the first sentence of the Manifesto our people are informed that, "it has pleased Divine Providence, whose ways are inscrutable, to subject Russia to heavy ordeals."  It has certainly pleased the Tsar to treat Russia thus, but it sounds impious to identify him with Deity.  Autocracy, however, has long been fond of the device.  Thus, on the day after Paul, the prototype of Nicholas II, had been murdered by a number of his trusted dignitaries, his son and successor, Alexander I, who was privy to the conspiracy for deposing his father, issued a manifesto which ran: "It has pleased Divine Providence to call away our dearly beloved father, the Tsar Paul Petrovitch, from life to death."  Europeans might feel shocked to see Divine Providence dubbed a regicide, but we Russians are accustomed to the sight.  In like manner the Deity was piously saddled with the responsibility of several other murders...especially those committed by Catherine II.

The Pietistic Lines of the War
And it is the same pietistic lines that the war is conducted.  One might almost say that our rulers hope too much of God or of his Saints.  When Admiral Togo's torpedo boats first damaged our battleships we grew angry had Te Deums (We praise thee God hymns) chanted.  And to repeated torpedo attacks we answered by multiplying prayers.  The Japanese prepared for the campaign by dispatching troops and we answered by opening our folding icons and raising aloft our religious banners and crosses while bending pliant knees.  Our commanders on being appointed went about to the holy places, from monastery to monastery, watching and waiting.  St. Seraphim was the general favorite, and image makers and monks did a brisk trade.  Kuropatkin pilgrimaged thus for fourteen days, and garnered in a gallery of icons unto the destruction of the enemy.  Then foreigners admired us. "What a religious people these Russians are! The Japanese are advancing towards Tu-ren-chen, yet the pious Muscovites are still engaged in prayer."  and the Commander in Chief, not yet satisfied with his piety and his collection of folded images, kept on pilgrimaging.  Finally he started.  And from many of the stations on the long way came telegraphic messages announcing the edifying tidings to all: "Arrived in Zlatoust. Heard mass.  Received icons."  And our people or Press rejoiced exceedingly.  At last, with a waggon load of holy images, he set out hopefully.  Admiral Skrydloff also watched and prayed and collected images against the impious enemy.  And yet our society, wise in its generation, says the enemy chose the better part. 
And the Manifesto which thus credits Providence with the consequence of the Tsar's misdeeds then gravely proceeds to announce a line of action calculated to yield an abundant harvest of still more calamitous results in the future, which will in turn be fathered on its Deity.  Thus control of the Pacific is indicated as the goal of his policy and object of his war, our predominance there being represented as hardy less necessary to Christendom that to ourselves.  Alas, all Christendom and all Russia immediately denied the statement with emphasis and unanimity.  Our people refused to sacrifice their blood or money for Manchuria, while the nations of the globe resolutely shrank from entrusting their interests to the care of our Tsar. But upon Nicholas II, these manifestations made no impression.  He seems to have lost none of his certitude that it is he who is right and the human race that is wrong, and none of his determination to force upon humanity what he deems good for it.

Internal Reforms
The question of internal reforms was next dealt with in a spirit which it is hardly an exaggeration to call ferocious.  As Providence had been confounded with the autocrat, so the nation was identified with the "evil minded leaders of the revolutionary movement," and the masses were exhorted to help to uproot sedition at home.  The Emperor struggling against this whole people.  If the theory of the theocracy underlying this home made Manifesto were correct, what a monstrous notion of God and Tsar would result!  The inscrutable Deity demanding hecatombs of the monarch's subjects and the monarch sending them to the slaughter with a degree of blitheness which Abraham standing over Isaac might have piously admired.
The Rescript, courtiers openly asserted, was the result of a Ministerial revolt, a modern and humane substitute for a Palace revolution.  The Emperor presumably took this view, for he never convoke the Council again.  People asked and still ask, "Will it be repeated?"
That same Friday evening the document was printed and published, and people who, having read the Manifesto in the morning, perused the Rescript in the evening, asked themselves whether the Empire was governed, like the Manichaean world, by a good principle and a bad.  For it was no manifest that Nicholas II was the nominal chief of two bodies moving in diametrically opposite directions: of the Council of Ministers in an outer chamber, and of the Boudoir Council in an inner chamber; and within the space of 24 hours he had first sanctioned the views of the one, and then assented to the plans of the other.  What was to become of it all?
From that moment onwards the autocrat has been struggling to free himself form the meshes of the net.  Whether he felt humiliated by the successful strategy of his Ministers, or was stimulated by the maxims of the Boudoir Councils is immaterial; important is the fact that he repented having signed the Rescript, and resolved to undo as far as was possible what he had done.

A Deplorable Picture
In the Far East our Naval and Military operations have been unsuccessful; at home our working men inaugurated a series of strikes, the upshot of which only a prophet can foresee: in the provinces our peasantry are shaking off the bonds of ages, and have been led against the land owners, whose houses they are pillaging and burning, and whose estates they are seizing: all our students and professors and many of our scholars have struck work; and the inhabitants of our towns are petitioning the Minister to allow them to create a civic guard for defense against the attacks of the police, and are meanwhile arming themselves.  In a word, our administration may be likened to a factory of which all the steam power is used up by the friction of the many wheels and all the income spent in buying oil to lubricate them.  At any moment most of what we have and are may disappear in fire and flames.
And the leader of the nation during this terrible crisis is a sickly youth of arrested development and morbid will, whose inability to govern might perhaps pass unnoticed if he would but allow any man of intellect or will power to grabble with the jarring elements.  This however, he refuses to permit, while allotting to obscure soldiers and seamen, tricksters and money grabbers, a share of the supreme power to the detriment of the nation.  The mental and moral impotency of this well intentioned mar-plot, who cannot be said to have had even experience, unless ten year of uniform failure could impart it, is one of the common place of conversation in town and country.  Even the rough and ready droshky drivers say of him that he has been thrust among rulers like a pestie among spoons.  Yet apprised of his impotence by the Boudoir Council he wishes to will, and takes the volition for the deed.  No occurrence, no event, makes a lasting impression on his mind.  Abroad our armies may be scattered, our ships sunk; our credit ruined; he is serene in spite of it all.

Absolutism Must Go
But the position is no longer endurable.  The crisis can now end in one way only...in the disappearance of that absolutism the advantages of which I hoped...vainly hoped, alas! to see rescued for the sake of the nation.  At present the one question which to my thinking may still be profitably discussed is whether, while there is yet time, the autocrat will voluntarily dissociate the future of his dynasty from that of the autocracy.  Will he cast his semi-divine privileges overboard in the storm to save his position in the Empire and perhaps what he values even more than his position?  That is a matter which primarily, almost exclusively, concerns, himself and his inspirers of the Boudoir Council, who still fancy that windmills may be turned with a hand bellows.  The other interested party, the nation, whose prisoner Nicholas II may be truly said to be, has already chosen its route...the shortest road to the goal, and will travel along resolutely.  It is for those who advise Nicholas to say whether he will desist from the policy of provocation now being pursued in his name.  When the nation has been fully aroused it will be too late.  And the time still left for reflection seems lamentably short.
Argument and persuasion have unhappily proved fruitless.  His nobles petitioned him, his Zemstvos memorialized him, every class, every profession and element of our population besought him to reform the administration and admit the people to a share in the government.  for a moment he appeared to listen, and then turned away.  Almost every nation on the globe adjured him to put an end to the unprecedented horrors of a wanton war.  Again he seemed to pay attention, but he soon moved aside and talked of something else.  For the whole world is wrong and Nicholas alone is right.  The individual who goes up the the clouds in an air filled balloon does not see himself ascending, but only his fellow men sinking away into insignificance.  The unnerved young man completely shut off from the world and without even a peep hole to look through, knows better what should and can be done there than the intellect of our people, the wisdom of the world.
For he is buoyed up by the encouragement and admiration of the Council of the Boudoir.  In his thirst for approval he dismissed several advisers and chose others; but the new ones repeated the warnings of their predecessors.  He then appointed a Council of Ministers in order to escape from the importunity of Witte, but his entire Council as one man not only offered him wholesome advice, but took care that he should adopt it.  And now he convokes it no more. "Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute." (this is only the first step that costs)  His own relatives, the political Grand Dukes, have abandoned him.  They suddenly stopped short in their onward course, wheeled round, and bowing respectfully to the Liberals made their profession of faith.  His own mother talked with him, exhorted and implored him to see things as they are.  Then she too finally ranged herself on the die of the moderate Reformers.

Millions at the Mercy of One Man
A nation of 140,000,000 is ordered about and experimented upon by this irresponsible young man, whose commands are known to be literally ruinous, and are suspected of being sometimes irrational.  A vast concourse of human beings are at his mercy.  His whim turns hundreds of thousands of citizens into orphans, beggars, and corpses.  And the living vainly mourn for the dead and murmur at their own lot, all the outcome of a whim, the passing whim, of a sickly creature who himself needs guidance and guardianship.  And the whole world watches this unprecedented spectacle with thrilling interest, with alternating hope and fear, with spontaneous sympathy and sorrow; for his people, his victims, with touching resignation act as their own executioners.  Thus between our country and progress, between our people and well being, between the world and peace, rises up a sorry fragment of volition, a driftless whim, an irrational impulse.  Nothing but that.  Yet in the twentieth century that infinitesimal obstacle is found to be insurmountable.  A private citizen who should mismanage his paternal estate as Nikolai Alexandrovitch misrules his Empire would be temporarily deprived of the control of his property, treated as a minor, and place under tutelage.  But the soul crippled Prince, by whose orders hundreds of thousands are crushed, impoverished, brutalized, and killed is inviolable.  Every expedient that human ingenuity, chastened by latter day ethics, could devise, has been tried and tried in vain.  His Ministers have warned him: his people have besought him; Grand Dukes have left him, his own mother and his wife's sister have dissociated themselves from him, and some of them ask the world to take note they are washing their hands of the autocrat, hoping to benefit the dynasty.  To no purpose.  The grain of sand still stops the motion of the wheel.  The articulate millions are fraternizing, combining and organizing.  Their forbidden congresses are held in the light of day, and eloquent philippics delivered against the autocracy and the autocrat.  For the people are beginning to pay as little heed to arbitrary edicts as the authorities pay to law.  "Silent leges."  By the early summer the intelligent classes will have been welded into a homogeneous mass, responsive to the slightest signal from the centre.  And against the wishes of this new Russia it may well be doubted whether any administrative machine could work even though it guarded by the mightiest army that ever followed a leader.  For the prisoner of Tsarskoye, however, there would still remain one, but only one issue; the unleashing of the blind forces of the peasantry against the few millions of the literate.  This barbarous expedient, unfortunately, deserves mention, for it has often been threatened and partially tried of late.  For the sake of humanity one hopes it may never be seriously resorted to.  For if the wild beast dormant in our peasants be once stung to violence, woe to our ill starred country.  Elemental chaos, primeval welter, paralyzing terror would result.  No concession would then avail to stop the advances of the destructive avalanche as it swept away historic landmarks and blotted out men and institutions, neither the disappearance of the autocrat, nor the abolition of the autocracy, nor even the establishment of a democratic republic.
At present a peaceful consummation is still possible at a reasonable price...the autocracy must go.  The Boudoir Council may no longer play havoc with the nation.  If to the Tsar's thinking, a Parliament, a council of Ministers, an experienced statesman, are one and all harmful; then he must be taught that a hole and corner Government, carried on by unknown adjutants, knavish favorites, and disreputable quacks, is incomparably more so.  And it must and shall cease, be the cost what it may.  Autocracy has heated it palace with sparks, and must now do penance in the ashes.  As for its last representative, whose reign has been a ten years' illness, and whose Empire is a cross between a poor house and a hospital, his fate can happily still be shaped by his kindred and friends.  But they have not time to lose.