W E must confess, unpopular as such a confession will be
with a portion of the British public, that we retain for the Czar a strong feeling of compassion. He is paying an awful price for an involuntary fault,—inadequacy to fill a position which he did not seek, and which in all history has scarcely been adequately filled. The Antonines, if we may trust their historians, almost alone among autocrats, were more than " happy accidents," rulers who escaped the tendency to insanity which is the curse attendant upon absolutism, and deliberately employed great powers of governing with unswerving intent to increase the happiness of mankind. There have been no autocrats like them ; and even one of them sanctioned, or commanded, the first of the fierce persecutions of converts to Christianity. Nicholas II. of Russia may not be—nay, certainly is not— what his flatterers report ; but neither is he the detestable figure which his enemies in Russia and in Austria now exult in describing. He has been hitherto one of the most luckless of mankind. He succeeded to that terrible throne, a throne on which its occupant's blunders have the evil result of crimes, when only twenty-six, having never enjoyed a good education, or any of that training in great affairs which so rapidly ripens experience. He fell from the first—even on the showing of the Tacitus of the Quarterly, who obviously hates him as much for being small and sickly as for any defects of policy—into the very worst hands, those of men who taught him to regard himself as a direct agent of the Deity. So he is, in a sense ; but that high faith which has made of some Kings great men, and made even of his father a determined ruler, could not give him the one quality which renders autocracy tolerable, the immutability as of Nature to which humanity can adjust itself; or the one quality which in Kings supplies all defects, the power of discerning in the crowds who crouch before the throne the half-dozen men who can bring to its service strength and wisdom. The first German Emperor was rather a stupid man—he wanted to keep Bohemia, and was angrily reluctant to merge his kingship in an Imperial crown—but he chose in the most unlikely quarters agents exactly fitted to do the work to be done, and, having chosen, never to the end of a long life deserted them. He never contracted the vice of vanity, or thought in his own heart that he had himself done all. Nicholas U. lacks that power entirely. He chose Alexeieff, Pflug, and the others who deceived him as to the character, the strength, and the intentions of the Japanese ; he must have picked the soldiers who have accomplished nothing; and he must have listened un- doubting to the men who advised the conquest of Manchuria before Russia was ready, the Russification of Finland when every Finn if left a Finn was ready to the at his command, and the destruction of the Armenian Church, which was doing him and his dynasty no harm. Nicholas II. is obviously, by the confession of enemies and advocates alike, one of the men who can be flattered into vacillation, and persuaded into acts which, performed by an autocratic Sovereign, have the effect of cruelties. Yet all that is his misfortune rather than his fault, and might be paralleled in the history of many a young manu- facturer or millionaire, too young or too feeble to be trusted with the power of turning " the easy wheel which sets sharp racks at work to pinch and peel." It is a little hard to condemn a Sovereign so savagely for the lack of powers which Providence has seen fit to withhold, and for an overweening self-consciousness which no man invested with his attributes and occupying his position can be without. We are not disputing the charges, which, indeed, could in many instances be disproved only by the Emperor himself, who alone knows his own motives, but we see no justice in exaggerating them into crimes. It would be as fair to condemn an avalanche for the assassination of the guides whom it sweeps into a crevasse.
And what a penalty the unhappy Sovereign is paying. Reflect for a moment what it must be to be autocrat of Russia, and to receive day by day the poisonous news which has been dripping on him, news which must prove to him at least that he has been steadily deceived ; that his " tiny enemy " is possessed of a giant's strength ; that the very base of his power, his military organisation, is I quivering under him, as a quagmire quivers to a heavy tread ; that he may be defeated as his great-grandfather was, and that not by Europe, but by Asia. And then reflect that the Emperor into whose ears this news is dripping does not know where to turn for advice at once honest and capable, and dimly sees that the mystical charm of his sceptre, which for three centuries has bound so many millions to his house, is slowly dying away ; that the " intellectuals " of Russia are all hostile to his regime ; and that even the peasants, sacrificed, as they think, for a war they no more understand than they would a war in the planet Mars, are raising their eyes from the ground with a query in them which has in it neither the old kindness nor the old respect. He loves respect, even too much, and all Europe is teeming with fierce libels on him, his counsellors, and his policy. And remember, besides, that all this is happening to a ruler who believes, honestly believes, that he is chosen of God, and entitled to His special protection ; and who must, therefore, amidst his misfortunes, at times at least, believe that the Almighty is offended either with himself or Russia ; and think what a depth of sadness there must be in that mind. Sadness, and also exasperation, for no man is to himself what the Quarterly paints, and correspondents from Vienna try this week to illustrate by darkening the shadows. We confess the position of the Czar, " storm'd at with shot and shell " of such asphyxi- ating criticism, seems to us most pitiful, and would do so even if the position were not aggravated by the fact that this ruler of millions who can sentence with a breath is never personally safe, could no more seek distraction in a breezy walk outside his own park walls than General Kuropatkin could seek distraction by a lonely ride through the Mo-tien-ling Pass. Hunted by Anarchists, deceived by Ministers, baffled by enemies whom he regards as small, the autocrat could find relief only in the powers of a great mind ; and those powers when he most needs them he must know are not there. Men in great positions know their own limitations, usually, better than their calumniators think, and it was a successful Czar of Russia who replied to a flatterer : " I am but a happy accident."
The conclusion forced upon our mind by the condition of Russia is that autocracy eats out what of good there is in the hereditary principle. The'burden is too great to be borne except by the picked man, and Nature will not do the picking for mankind. " The strength of Kings is in
the men who gather round the throne," and some day or another, if the autocratic principle is combined with the principle of hereditary descent, the man is sure to arrive who is personally not competent to bear that heavy crown, and at the same time lacks the insight to pick the men who could endure for him the weight. The Roman system may last for ages, because each Imperator fights his way to the throne, and in fighting successfully shows his com- petence ; and the British system may last for ages, because the failure in the King does not necessarily involve failure in the State ; but hereditary autocracy is too dangerous to gain the approval of statesmen. It stakes too much upon too narrow a chance, the chance, namely, that for centuries one family shall produce eldest sons who are equal to any possible emergency, who are at the same time healthy, and who possess that combination of aptitudes with oppor- tunism which we describe as luck. Such chances are rare ; and though Providence governs, it is clearly no part of the mysterious policy of Providence to protect in- competent Kings from the penalties of their incompetence.
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