THE RUSSIAN RUMOURS.
WE do not suppose there is much in these rumours from Russia, though they are widely spread by -unconnected correspondents who presumably believe them. Stories of the sicknesses of Kings are usually untrust- worthy ; and if they are also despots, they can never catch cold without being represented as seriously ill. Their physicians hold office by a tenure of silence until formal bulletins appear, and the whispers of attendants are exag- gerated in passing from mouth to mouth until they become positively deceptive. The present Czar is a healthy man, whose seclusion does not prevent his taking exercise ; the hereditary enemy of the Romanoffs, melancholia, does not fall on them so early ; and as to his dying of " nerves," that is a story sure to be circulated about anybody whose life it is necessary to guard. He may die, like any other man, and will die in God's good time; but his clinger is assassina- tion,, not disease. That the Czar is in more than usual danger of assassination, is quite probable. One of those spasms of despairing rage which periodically seize upon cultivated Russians outside the official circle has obviously recurred, and the strange Secret Society which permanently threatens the Czar is almost always provoked by such inci- dents into a fresh display of vitality. Moreover, in a true despotism, all discontent develops fanatics who see no hopeful path except through assassination, and who menace the life of the monarch because they have been taught to believe that the monarch is all-in-all. An Emperor of Russia has, however, always devotees around him, and can be protected from everything except domestic treachery, which the present Czar need not fear, or that military revolt which the West is always predicting, but which never occurs in Russia except during an interregnum, when the soldiers are bewildered by the momentary disappearance of an object for their unreasoning loyalty. As to the spread of revolutionary feeling, the feeling, that is, which would abolish the autocracy without attacking the Czar, where is its executive force to come from ? There was such a force in France in 1789, in the shape of the mob of Paris, which could fight fairly well, and which never once during the whole Revolution was fairly faced by a con- siderable body of Royal troops ; but there is no such force in Russia, while there is an irresistible Army which implicitly obeys orders. There is not a trace of evidence that the populace of St. Petersburg is angry with the Czar, though it may hate the police ; and if it were angry, angry to the point of insurrection, what could it possibly effect ? It is not going, we may be sure, to precipitate itself on the bayonets of the Guard; and if it did, it would in an hour learn the lesson that the day for popular insurrections is over, and that no mob what- ever, however resolute or however self-sacrificing, can stand for ten minutes against weapons of precision. It might as well dash itself on a storm-wave, and hope by self- devotion to drive that back. For moral pressure, again, there is no leverage. There is no representative body ; there is no class which the Sovereign dares not strike at wholesale ; there is no foreign army which, as in the Italian revolutions or our own, can be invited in, to give expression and solidity to the general discontent. The students of the Universities just now are making an uproar, and despite their extravagance of language, they probably have serious grievances, which a wise Czar would remedy at once by decree ; but half of them are not revolutionists, even in sympathy ; and if they were all united and all desperate, they would be powerless. They are but a fraction of the educated class, and the grand fact of Russia is, that the whole educated class taken together can do nothing ; that it is a body of officers without an army; and that if the Government ordered its deportation en masse to Siberia, to Siberia it would be sent. Autocracy in Russia rests for the present on a rock, the devotion of 90 per cent. at least of the whole people to the person of the Czar, who, in spite of his seclusion, in spite of Nihilism, in spite of middle-class discontent, might to-morrow order any chance crowd of workmen in St. Petersburg to throw M. de Giers into the Neva, and he would be thrown at once. The solitary chance for Revolutionists in Russia, as apart from Nihilists, is to convince the Czar himself that change would be beneficial, as they once, it is believed, convinced his father, Alexander II. He himself is their possible lever, and, unless by some miracle of misfortune the Army or the priesthood. turned against him, he alone.
It is imagined, we believe, in England, and, indeed, in all Western Europe, that such a despotism as that of Russia cannot go on for an indefinite period ; but where is the proof of that ? The despotism of the Caesars, which was almost of the same kind, the oppression of the great slave-owners being, if anything, worse than the oppression of the bad section of the Russian officials, went on for centuries without provoking one serious civil insurrection. The system now prevailing in Russia has lasted at least from the death of Peter I., in 1724 ; and from the accession of Nicholas, now a space of sixty-five years, its downfall has been expected in London and Paris from year to year ; but it has never fallen. What has been changed. since that date to make it probable that it should fall now, when the effective force of the Army, considered as an instrument of repression, has at least been trebled ? We shall be told that the serfs have been emancipated, and that is true ; but emancipa- tion only bound them the closer to the Throne. Or we may be told that liberal ideas are penetrating all " society," and that, in part, is true also ; but then, the final answer is, that if all Russian " society " above the " black people," the peasants and handicraftsmen, held the opinions of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Cunningha.me Graham, they would be just as powerless as they are at present. No opinion whatever will stop a bullet. Or, finally, we may be told that the " spirit of the age " is unfavourable to autocracy ; but that, even if it is true—and we see the Kings everywhere resuming their old initiative—is merely a begging of the question. Why should the "spirit of the age" penetrate into Russia any more than into China, where a Sovereign absolute as deity reigns over a population at least as " civilised " as Russian peasants —though, we fully admit, with a lower morale—through an official aristocracy com- pared with which the Russian "Tchin" is lenient and pure? Ideas are like seed, they only germinate upon fitting soil ; and so far as appears, the idea of responsible government no more suits the Russians who work than it suits the Chinese peasants. Of course, if the people were generally oppressed according to their own idea of oppression, there might be formidable movements either in China or Russia ; but then, within the limits we have stated, is that the case ? Classes are oppressed, no doubt, and one particular class, that of political prisoners, may be even oppressed atrociously ; but are the people, as a series of multitudes, consciously oppressed ? We suspect that over an enormous proportion of the area of Russia, life seems to the body of the people just what it always was, except that landlords have less power. The conscription is as it was, the village commune still exists, the officials are probably rather better, because they feel a little the effect of improving culture. Justice is not refused, it is only made dear, and the dearness of justice is expected everywhere, in England almost as much as in Russia, and is borne with patiently. That grievance of corruption, which seems to us so monstrous, and morally is so monstrous, strikes a popula- tion accustomed to it very much as a fee system strikes ourselves, or as the priests' method of collecting their incomes in Ireland strikes their flocks,—that is, as some- thing not quite pleasant, but not new, and at all events entirely unavoidable. Resistance may come at last in Russia, for the Russians are white men and Christians, and in both capacities retain the power of advancing, how- ever slowly ; but it may be whole generations first, and may then direct itself against the officials, instead of against the Throne. The only thing that can shake that is defeat in battle, which might break a certain mystical charm ; and even of that there is no certainty whatever. Napoleon's entrance into Moscow only de- veloped Russian patriotism, and the autocracy has never been more complete than since the Crimean War. It is a marvellous, almost an awful spectacle, that of the master of a grand Empire, autocratic as a deity, yet never safe except amidst his troops ; but it was the spectacle which Rome presented from the death of Augustus to the accession of Diocletian ; and nothing exists to prove that its continuance in modern terms is morally impossible. Seclusion by itself will not destroy a Throne, or that of the Sultan would have passed away a hundred years ago ; and a Czar can govern an Empire as the Pope governs a world of his own,—from the interior of a Palace carefully watched by a guard.
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