THE RUSSIAN CZAR.
THERE are plenty of reasons why the English people should receive the Czar with respect, with courtesy, and even with
some distinct and apparent expression of pleasure ; and there is no desire, that we see, either to go into fits of flunkeyism, or to in- dulge the wild and most unmannerly curiosity excited by the Sultan. He is their guest, he is, through his daughter's marriage, a close connection of the English House, and he is by his position by far the most formidable potential foe they are ever likely to see in the flesh. It seems impossible for England to form that definite and trustworthy alliance with Russia which would give Asia a century of peace and development, and failing that alliance, a Russian Czar must have, whatever his private feeling in the matter, inter- ests and designs radically opposed to the interests and designs of Great Britain. Nicholas or Alexander, it is all the same, he must extend his Asiatic dominion, and he must make that extension pay. The clearer the Emperor's perception that in pushing those designs against instead of with us he risks the resistance of a power equal to his own, the more moderate will be his course, and while our policy on the Continent remains a nullity, nothing can quicken that perception like the sight of England itself,—of her swarming masses, her united society, her limitless wealth, her terrible marine. There is very little use in showing him soldiers, for he is the Czar—that is, actual head of his own army—and as we shall not collect, or attempt to collect, the three hundred thousand trained men really at our disposal in the Islands, or the quarter-million disposable for active movement in Asia, the sight will only leave a false and depreciatory impression. Apart from the Marine, it is England alone which can impress the master of a million soldiers,—England, which men who have lived long within her shores are, like the Emperor Napoleon, always so loath to attack ; England, whose power, as Pozzo di Borgo wrote to the Emperor Nicholas, "has the world for base," but whose Army is to other armies what a bullet is to a shell. The more the people show themselves, the more they prove that their hostility is to the policy and not to the persons of the Romanoffs, the more impression they will make on any Czar ; while as regards this one, there is one sovereign reason for personal cordiality. He, he individually, he alone, in defiance of pressure of the most exasperating kind, in defiance of social dangers which would stagger an Abolitionist, did liberate thirty-two millions of white men from slavery, real slavery, the liability to be beaten by their landlords till they did whatever they were told. That act outweighs even now, and will outweigh still more in the future, every debateable point in the policy of the Czar, and it is one which fortunately the multitude here in England can thoroughly comprehend.
We wonder if they will realise also—for if they do they will sympathise with it—the unique loneliness, and therefore the unique sadness of their visitor's position. He will sit at the banquet in the Guildhall with relatives, friends, agents, all around him, the loneliest and the most burdened individual there. The Russian Czar is the last European gentleman left possessed of true autocracy, of power which, when it is studied, seems to remove him from the ranks of mankind, till one begins to conceive what a Roman meant when he erected altars to the living and human Cm,ar Augustus of his day, and in the double capacity he must be both a sad and an over-burdened man. It is always the custom, when any Rus- sian alliance, or marriage, or visit is in question, to assert that all things are changed in Russia, that the Czars have sub- mitted to the restraints of law, that they have now no speciality which separates them, say, from the German Emperor, or any other head of the Executive ; but the saying is not true and not of any particular use, for we see no reason why hampered great- teas should he more acceptable to England than greatness un- hampered. The autocracy of the Russian Czar, though more gently used by Alexander II. than it was either by Nicholas or his father in his later years, is as perfect now as it was at any period, rests on a stronger basis, and while Russia exists as a great empire will probably never be surrendered. Its grand speciality, as apart from all other forms of what Americans call " one-man power," is that it has never been assailed by the people, and probably never will be, that it is identified with Russian history as completely as Constitu- tionalism is identified with our own, and that of its myriad enemies in Russia no one suggests that it can cease without Russia also ceasing to be the unity it is now. The notion of autocracy in its eompletest sense, of authority unlimited by anything save will, was deliberately conceived by the second founder of the Empire, Ivan the Great, as the only instrument by which he could destroy the Tartars, who claimed the suzerainty, and restore order to an Empire distracted by petty tyrannies. It was enormously strengthened by the despairing reverence, as for hostile, but yet rightful and superhuman power, with which the able lunatic Ivan the Terrible invested the throne, and it was consolidated by Czar Peter's formation of an ultimately victorious army and assumption of a Pontificate never since surrendered. The history of Russia, and 'especially of the dynasty of Rurik, is still a sealed book to the West, but it may, we believe, be fairly said that from the deatructiou of the Golden Horde in 1478, which liberated Russia from the Tartars, to the extinction of the direct line of Rurik, more than 130 years after, the autocracy was hated rather by the nobles, whom -it crushed, than by the people, who looked to the Czar as their protector from the excesses of the Boyars, of pretenders, of any one who could gather force enough to govern a district like a brigand. When in 1613 the people, led by their clergy, called the lad Alexis Romanoff to the throne, partly because his father -was then Patriarch, and partly because he bore some remote and ill-defined relation to the House of Rurik, they indeed imposed an oath that he would govern well, which was taken and kept, but the autocratic idea remained ; in their minds, the Czar was still all-powerful; the oath was not repeated, and from 1643 to -the present day the people have supported the autocracy against all its foes. The movements which Czar Nicholas dreaded were all led by the nobles and the literary class, and all ceased to be formidable when the present Czar, aware alike of the danger from 'subversive ideas—for almost all Russian Liberals, not Poles, have been Socialists of an extreme kind—and from military -defeat, and from the irritated nobles, terminated all hope of resist- ance, completed the steady policy of the Czardom, and we trust, -carried out an impulse of his own heart, by the decree of March 3, 1861, a decree which liberated the entire people, and justified the absolute power which alone could have made its execution pos- sible. No conceivable Parliament in Russia could or would have passed such a decree. Recent events prove that it has not produced the only substantial danger to be feared, a refusal to serve in the army, and since then, the Czar has remained master of his dominions in the fullest sense in which the word can be conceived, for he is master of men who believe, and for two generations at least will continue to believe, that in the mastery of the Sovereign lies their own security and their own best hope of religious safety. That -the power is leniently exercised in Russia itself may be true in a certain sense, though it is necessary even there to set Western ideas about repression aside, but that it exists there is no doubt whatever. The Czar stands literally alone, supported by a people which could and would on the faintest signal clear away every- thing between himself and the peasantry. There does not exist in Russia any man, or any corporation, or any class which could -withstand his written order, unless it visibly altered religion, and -even that exception does not extend to the discipline of the -Church, which- has been radically changed by the decree abolishing the hereditary character of the priesthood. Naturally enough, this Czar, being an educated man, and in his own sense of the phrase a sincere patriot, allows ordinary life to go on as usual, 'under the control of law ; but if he dooms an individual or a cor- poration, there is for either no escape. Nothing, should secrecy be desirable, will be known of the facts ; there exists no one with the faintest right to be consulted, and resistance is simply impos- eible. It is not merely that the Czar's order would be carried out by the soldiers, as would an order of the German Emperor, or of the Emperor of Austria, but that the people would carry it out, that they would believe his order certainly right, inspired by wis- -dom far above their own, intended to benefit Russia, and too sacred to be even discussed. Petty revolts of a very savage kind often occur in Russia, but they are always directed against the wan or men who are not carrying out the Sovereign's necessarily
beneficent will. A command to the nearest moujik to fling the Premier into the river would be obeyed, if the Emperor were re- cognised, instantly, and with no other thought but that the Premier was in some way injurious to Russia, and must cease.
It is this direct, and as it were universal power, unfettered by anything even as unsubstantial as opinion, which constitutes the separateness of this autocracy. The Hohenzollern can set armies in motion by mere volition, and so can the American President, but neither one nor the other could interfere with the ordinary con- duct of a suit. A verbal order from the Czar might cause the suit to cease, and plaintiff, defendant, and judge to disappear, and he would still be within his legal right, beyond the possibility of external criticism, much less censure, and beyond the mental criticism of the immense majority of his entire people. In their minds, something that he knew, and no one else, must have re- quired the order. And strangest and most wearisome fact of all, the balance of evidence shows that it is wise, from one point of view, that this should be so. The Czar alone in Russia has an interest in her good government. He alone can be trusted to strike suddenly, swiftly, and sufficiently hard at the local tyrannies to which the power taken from him would instantly accrete. The old tyranny of the Boyars is over, but the new tyranny of the bureaucracy would be far more searching, severe, and anarchical, and would undoubtedly be resisted by the one thing in Russia strong enough to resist any order save that of the Czar, —the village community. But for the Czardom, leagues of these communities would at once cover the country, would become practically independent, and would resolve Russia once more into her primitive elements,—the independent city, the league of villages, the tract owned by one man able to pay armed followers, the very situation from which Ivan the Great, no doubt by a succession of indefensible acts, rescued his dominions. That dissolution of the Empire might be good or bad for mankind —we are not discussing that—but it is not what Russians, with their endless pride in the greatness of their country, want ; and it is because this would happen, and every Russian knows it would happen, that the autocracy in its completeness seems to us so likely to endure. It is a Cmsarism, as well as a Czardom,—a power that meets the needs of the democracy, as well as a power continuing from the past. And it is because it must exist, because a patriot Czar could not weaken himself with- out going against the convictions of his people, and endangering the Empire which it is his duty and their will to keep alive, that the position seems to us so lonely and so sad. The power in- dispensable to the end is too great for mortal man, or rather, too great for happy mortal man. The lot of a good Czar is to labour endlessly, to endure endlessly, to punish endlessly, to have no complete reliance on any brain but his own, and yet to doubt all the while whether he can possibly succeed, or whether man could succeed in a task at once so imperative and so impossible. The mere work needs thirty hours a day. Mr. Bright once declared that no man could accomplish the task required of the Indian Viceroy, and be spoke very nearly the fact ; but the head of the House of Romanoff has to accomplish it or fail, without the immense support and relief of compulsion never to break the law. Lie is bound incessantly to break the ordinary law, bound to remain all-powerful over the individual as well as over the organisation, to see that he is faithfully served, as well as that his policy is wise. No efficient Viceroy of India has ever returned to England to be a pillar of the State ; no effective Czar has ever lived who, sooner or later, did not droop under a burden he never can lay down. The enormous power is accompanied by an enor- mous responsibility, for "after all," as Abraham Lincoln said, "I must ultimately decide ;" and by enormous dangers, to which no man could remain indifferent without armouring himself either in religious resignation, or if that were impossible, in a hard belief in fate. All men have Alnaschar dreams, but the man who would willingly dream that be was the earthly Providence of Russia knows little of the Russian Throne.
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