THE MOSCOW CORONATION.
50XE of our contemporaries, hard put to it for subjects, have seized upon the coming coronation at Moscow, and seem disposed to discount that event. One of them sees all kinds of evil " pro- babilities " lurking under the expected display of semi-oriental magnificence—" barbaric pearl and gold." The state of Russia, impoverished by the war, is about to incur an enormous expendi- ture; the nobles of Russia, vying with each other in extrava- gance are about to beggar themselves—to barter their wealth for a transient splendour ; the merchant serfs of Russia, opulent men, are to be sacrificed by their hitherto lenient and, gentle masters to fill up the great gaps in the masters' estates ; while the lesser nobles perform the same operation on the crowd of industrious serfs of the lower order. In short, Russia which has stood out many a tough war, is to be rendered bankrupt by a coronation. Nor will its evil influences stop there. The newspapers say that IL de Moray has gone to Moscow with an unlimited credit on the exchequer of Imperial France ; and Imperial France is doomed to fall into financial straits, because an ambassador is indulging a taste for lavish display at the court of Russia. The only saving-clause in the jeremiade is that the ambassador of England is a modest gentleman who will not ruin his country, but, like a beauty at a ball in simple attire, will outshine his colleagues by contrast.
There is, however, another stand-point from whieh the stately ceremonial of Moscow may be viewed, and whence the vista of the future displays a different series of incidents. What if the results were beneficial to Russia, rather than disastrous ? What if the European invasion of Moscow, now in progress, should contribute to moral and commercial changes advantageous alike to Russia and Europe ? Some light may be thrown on this problem by comparing the circumstances under which the approaching coronation will take place with those under which the last was celebrated. Nicholas was crowned on the 3d September 1826; Alexander will be crowned on the 7th September 1856: an interval of thirty years yawns between the two events. How great the intervening obanges1 In 1826, the first steam-ship had just traversed the ocean from England to Calcutta. Now, there is not only a steam- bridge between England and India, and England and America, and England and Russia but a steam-bridge round the world.
In 1826, the first English railway had not been built. Those who journeyed to see the Emperor crowned at Moscow in 1826 travelled laboriously across Europe, or sailed at the mercy of the wind and wave up the rocky gulfs of the Baltic. Now Europe
is covered with railways ; the St. Jean d'Acre lies in Now, harbour ; and a railway stretches from the city of Peter to the old city of the Czars. One more fact : within a few hours of the moment when the crown shall be placed on the brow of Alexander the Second, the electric telegraph will publish the fact in Vienna, Paris, and London, nay, in all the towns of Great Britain,—as a few short months ago, it told us at sunset that an Emperor had died that day at noon. And the circumstances under which the coronation ceremonial will be performed are as different as the ehsuge in the world ; in-
deed, they are the fruit of that change. It is not that princes and ambassadors extraordinary—that Russian nobles and repre- sentatives of every Russian province or dependency, even to the wild Kirghese and the people of the far-off moor, flock to Mos- cow in 1856, as they flocked thither in 1826; but it is that the people of Europe, represented by her sight-seers, have entered the Russian empire by St. Petersburg, and have carried up to Moscow by railway the atmosphere and influence of Europe. It is the counter-stroke of the French invasion of 1812. When we re- member that the Russians are an inquisitive and imitative people —when we remember that all kinds of Russian subjects, the clean as well BA the unclean, will be gathered at Moscow—when we remember that nothing breaks down the walls of exclusion like personal intercourse on a great scale, and that at Moscow and elsewhere there will be personal intercourse, more or less intimate, on a very great scale indeed—then we shall feel that the coro- nation-festivities may be the beginning of quite a new tera in the dominions of the Czar. Once the bonds of exclusion broken through, it will be very difficult to reunite them. Rus- sia has done pretty well on the isolated system : it may have been the dream of the Czars that she should continue to be self- contained and exclusive; it may have been their dream that Russia should take from Europe all that she could get in the way of privilege of trade and intercourse, and give as little as she could. But this is not a time when systems of exclusion can ex- ist for long. A thousand natural forces bear their weight upon the artificial barriers from without; a thousand natural wants sap them from within. The simple fact that the Russians arc an in- dustrious people—that their smart men are inevitably- impelled into the vortex of European enterprise—that the more they tend to commercial and industrial ventures, the more they must see how inimical to success are restrictive regulations—the fact that they want capital, and that the capital they want Europe can supply,—these considerations suggest some of the agents and in- fluences which may open Russia to European civilization, and these are the agents and influences that will be fostered by the coronation-festivities of 1856.
The Russian armies that marched across Europe in the great war carried back with them seeds of political change, which were never allowed to germinate. The army of travellers that has in- vaded Russia en masse for the first time in 1856, will carry with them the seeds of industrial change and international inter- course which no Czar can destroy, because they. will be sown and received unconsciously, and will 'be deposited in the nation, and not in a machine which may be broken up and isolated piece by piece in a dreary Caucasus or an icy Siberia.
The Emperor Nicholas opened and closed his reign with a war of conquest. It is possible for the Emperor Alexander, if the Autocrat of Russia is so powerful as men say, at least to open his reign with a serious attempt, not to conquer Turkey or Sweden, but to conver Russia. Far more powerful, far more beneficent would Russia be, were her boundless resources developed amid the sunshine of peace, instead of being wasted in the havoc of war undertaken from a lust of conquest. There are causes which impel Russia into courses of aggression—the want of ports, for example : but Providence has not made the Russians a maritime people ; Europe will never permit Russia to be mistress of the gates of the Mediterranean or the North Sea. Providence has endowed her with vast agricultural wealth, and inexhaustible heaps of the raw material-of things useful to man. It would be the part of a wise Emperor not to strive for the unattainable, but to take and make the most of the goods which the gods have so plenteously provided. At all events, from the starting-point of the 7th September 1856, such is the option offered to Alexander the Second-; and if he take the wiser course, he will encourage a continuity of that European invasion of his dominions which will meet his gaze when he receives the crown.
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