OLD AND NEW IN RUSSIA.
THE present state of Russia is in the highest degree cri- tical. Ever since the Crimean war the Government has been in extreme need of money ; its army has been re- duced; the great public works are carried on slowly ; and yet silver is scarce, and the treasury almost bankrupt. Meantime the great social problem of emancipating thirty million serfs and raising as many crown peasants to the actual rank of citizens has been discussed, determined on, and only not carried out. Lastly, the Poles have taken ad- vantage of their ruler's embarrassments, and of the new state of feeling in Europe, to demand the restoration of their old constitutional rights. It is clear that any one of these difficulties might try the resources of statesmanship in ordi- nary times, and we must not judge the Russian Government harshly for moving slowly, and sometimes retracing its steps, if we can only feel sure that it is moving onwards. Un- fortunately there is reason to fear that the Czar and his councillors do not fully understand that the present is one of those critical moments which decide the whole future of a society. Alexander II. cannot be too highly praised for the steadiness with which he has clung to the great moral conviction of his life—the necessity of emancipation. But having willed and ordered it, he seems to think that its details may be left to adjust themselves, and that, after a few years of bear-hunts and pleasure parties, be will wake up in a regenerated society. None of his subjects know better than the Emperor that Ignatieff is a violent and untrustworthy man. Yet having himself characterized his conduct in the strongest language in council, he continues to entrust him with the care of the capital. No sovereign probably is less bloody by nature than the one whose first acts were to liberate the exiles and make peace. Yet either from indo- lence or from carelessness he commits the charge of Poland to a broken-down old man, trained in a .camp, when a single foolish or brutal act may cause a massacre or precipitate a revolt. Every .free nation is interested in the success of the Russian experiments in freedom, and we watch the ne- gligence and weakness of a well-meaning man with the more terror, because a failure at present would throw back liberty and civilization in Europe indefinitely. At a moment when half the nobility are in voluntary exile, when the students are in revolt, and the peasants either in arms or moody and ready to rise, it is necessary to retrace the steps by which a great and good measure has been blun- dered in the execution. We purpose to consider chiefly the question of the emancipation of the nobles' serfs. Ten years ago the chief features in the position of this class were that they owed service to lords, who in return provided them with houses and plots of ground, and were bound to care for them in sickness and support them in case of need. Legally the lord had a right to the serf's property, which public opinion prevented him from enforcing, and legally no such status as domestic servitude was recognized, while it yet existed in every street of every town of the empire. It is evident from all this that the serf could not be freed by a simple measure. From long prescription he had learned to look on his cottage and fields as his own, much as our own serfs in the middle ages acquired a copyhold tenure in their holdings, but with this difference, that the Russian peasant, having never paid a money rent, regards serfdom as a purely personal obligation. It is idle to tell him that he has been living upon his lord's land, and paying rent in labour ; he looks on the land as his own inalienable right, and never connects it in thought with the roads he has made or the fields he has reaped for his old master. No Government, therefore, can attempt to turn him loose upon the world landless and free ; he would sooner die on his hearth; and no one in Russia even thinks the experiment possible. Here, therefore, there is at first sight one great difficulty, that the Russian nobility are called upon not only to free their serfs, but to leave them the land they are settled on. Again, the existing poor law, so to speak, is abrogated ; the nobles have no duties where they have no property ; and the communes must henceforth support their own members. A few of the less self-reliant among the peasantry were so sen- sible of this that they desired not to be freed. Probably the more hopeful will be sorely tried for the first few years to meet the chances of sickness and bad seasons, with the shift- less habits that servitude always engenders. Given these difficulties, how has the Government met them ? Its simplest plan would have been to redeem the peasants and their holdings itself, and pay itself back as it could, either by payments stretched over many years, or by increased taxation, or merely by the increased revenue that low taxes yield in prosperous times. Low as the Russian exchequer is, its character stands high in the money-market, and the vastness of its undeveloped resources inspires con- fidence. Accordingly, an offer was made by several bank- ing firms, including the name of Serres of Paris, to ad- vance the sum necessary for buying the people free. The offer, with several other plans more or less like it, was rejected. The Government wanted moral confidence and the initiative necessary for great measures. Instead of it, they devised a system of compromise, by which the pea- sant was to have the usufruct of his land with a sort of tenant-right in it, while the property was to remain vested in the lord. This system, which it would be difficult to carry out in an old country, is far too complex to be understood by the Russian peasantry, who, having indulged wild hopes that the Emperor would divide the country among them, are not prepared to see their actual rights, as they consider them, diminished. But it must be added that the details of the governmental scheme are even worse than its conception. It has been drawn up by men favourable to the proprietors, and wedded to the stolid routine of office. Everything is complex, obscure, and even contradictory, where it should have been short and simple. The new law on " peasant right" is a fair-sized folio, like an English Blue-book. Of course there are few peasants who can read it, or under- stand it when it is read to them. In the same way, in many cases of the transfer of land, written contracts are now to be substituted for the old verbal agreements that are said to have worked well hitherto, and which the people understand. The divisions of land are to be made with reference to the character of the soil. The proprietor is in certain cases to retain in his own hands as much as a third of the land now occupied by the peasants. Where they are settled within a certain distance of his dwelling, he may, if he pleases, trans.. port them to another spot ; and in this regulation alone there is a great opening for oppression. Two years are fixed as the term during which all arrangements are to be made, and during that period there is, of course, a sullen antagonism between high and low. Hitherto, indeed, the peasants have refused to change the cornea for a fixed rent, on the ground that they will not acknowledge their lords' right of owner- ship in the land. For the same reason, and in the full con- viction that the Government scheme Will have to be given up, they decline to subscribe any contract with the pro- prietors. The climate of Russia makes fuel a necessity of life. Hitherto, the peasants have enjoyed commonage in the forests ; they are excluded from this right in the new code, which makes them pay for what they have till now enjoyed gratuitously. We have mentioned only some of the flaws in the emancipation ukase. What we have said will probably explain the numerous risings of peasants that have taken place in the very year when all Europe thought that a people had been brought out of bondage. It is not safe needlessly to excite the hopes of a nation, and then cheat their expecta- tions with an imperfect reform. But besides the mere question of setting men free, and putting them in a condition to support themselves, the Government has had to consider what the future require- ments of self-government will be. Our readers probably know that the crown peasants have long since been organized into communes or mere, which possess the village lands as corporate property, divide them amongst one another, pro- vide for their poor, and are responsible for the taxes to the crown. The system has worked well hitherto, though we do not suppose that this peculiar form of communism can be anything but a transitional phase towards private property. But the Government, while it retains the same organization in its new project for the peasantry, has modified it in one essential particular. Hitherto the members of the meer, when they met to transact business under their starosta, or alderman, have voted like a Polish Diet or an English jury; that is to say, any proposal that was not carried unanimously was rejected. It is easy to understand that the public opinion of a village is very strong, and that opposition, for its own sake, would not be tolerated ; the minority or indi- vidual dissentients must be sustained by a strong sense of right. The Government now proposes to introduce the Parliamentary or collegiate system, and make the vote of the majority binding on all. To English readers the change, at first sight, will appear unimportant, and, if anything, benefi- cial. But they must remember that the bureaucratic system in Russia has infinite ramifications and agents. The Govern- ment know that they can often pack a majority where they could not intimidate a whole commune, and questions such as that of passports may arise, in which personal liberty will be much less safe in the hands of the greater number than it would have been in the bands of all. Again, the mere fact that the communes hold and distribute corporate property, and impose taxes, makes it most important that individual rights should be jealously guarded. Three or four rich men may fare as ill in a remote village as the wealthier rate- payers of New Orleans and New York have fared of late years in their respective municipalities. It is a noteworthy feature of the present crisis that Eng- lish institutions are at once diligently studied and curiously misunderstood, or perversely misapplied. Prince Peter Dol- gorouki is a favourable instance of a misguided constitu- tionalism. He is an exile in the interest of oligarchy, and pub- lishes a Russian journal in Paris, The Future, to promote his peculiar views. One of these is a bicameral Parliament, in which the Russian nobility are to be the Upper House. Now, the instance of the American Senate, no doubt, shows that an Upper House may be formed and work well even in a democracy, but the precedents of France, Prussia, and of Canada under Mr. Pitt, as certainly prove that a peer- age cannot be extemporized. The Russian nobility is a factitious one. It owes its power chiefly to its wealth ; it has no history, and no influence among the people ; it is limited in every direction by the rival aristocracies of office and the army ; and as the law of entail does not exist, its great families are necessarily short-lived. It once tried to seize the chief power, on the accession of the Empress Anne; it imposed its own conditions upon her; and in a few days she tore up the charter, and not a single voice in the nation murmured against her. To attempt to galvanize such a body into political life on the model of the English Peerage, which is historical, wealthy, in possession of office, and re- cruited every year from the ranks, would be sheer pedantry. Unhappily there are English institutions which are more easily wrested to the purposes of the reaction. Hitherto in Russia every man has, been allowed to choose any person he likes as his advocate in court. The Russian bar is now to be made a corporation like the English, which only edu- cated and rich men can belong to. The limitation was need- less, and will work ill for liberty. Of a similar kind is the change which has lately produced so much ferment at the University of St. Petersburg. Under Alexander I. Russian students were of three kinds—rich men living on their own resources, scholars assisted by exhibitions, and men like our own sizars, whose only claim to support was their poverty. A man of this latter class might, indeed, be a noble, but he might also be a peasant, furnished with a passport from his commune, who having passed an examination was then fed and clothed for three years by the Go- vernment, with the understanding that they might after- wards claim his services for five or six years. If, for 'in- stance, he studied medicine, he would be sent, on getting his degree, to some district in which a country doctor was wanted. But besides the very poor, many sons of priests and of poor gentlemen, who are a large elass in Russia, were enabled to study because no fees were demanded of them. To charge such men as these eight pounds for ad- mission is as if the fees at St. Bees or Lampeter were doubled. But the bureaucracy no doubt dreaded the increasing number of educated men, and believed that if only the rich and well-born were admitted, St. Petersburg and Moscow would become aristocratic clubs like the Oxford and Cam- bridge Colleges. Count Putiatine, who took office with the understanding that he would carry out these restrictions, has been a good deal in England, but seems to have learned nothing better among us than the narrow pietism of Exeter Hall, upon which he has now engrafted the spirit of the Rus- sian reaction. His criminal folly has, however, elicited some noble flashes of spirit among the young men of St. Peters- burg. When the new scheme of fees was first promulgated, the richer students determined to subscribe among them- selves and pay for the poorer. It will scarcely be credited that as soon as the project got wind the Government forbade it. The officers and cadets of the Academy of the Artillery sent in a petition to the Crown, stating that they had heard with regret of the proposal to charge entrance-fees at the Uni- versity, that they could not doubt it was only done to procure funds in the present financial crisis, and that they begged to offer a contribution of five per cent. upon their own incomes as a substitute. Those who know what a continental despotism is will know that every man who signed that ge- nerous memorial did it with a certainty that his name would be entered on the black books of the police, and erased from any list recommending him for promotion. It is by a series of little heroic acts like these that a nation is educated for liberty. It is most important that public opinion in Western Europe should be brought to bear upon the Russian Govern- ment. They are doing their best to promote a revolution ; some from mere indolence or incapacity, others from the hope of discrediting all reform. Two little instances will show the spirit at head-quarters. A student of sixteen has been arrested as chief agent in the late Polish troubles. This, it may be said, is merely foolish. Mere folly is criminal in some periods, but the next case we have to quote is worse. The letters of the Times correspondent, which we may observe, by the way, are admirable, stated lately that General Bustrom had invited the soldiers to chastise (1. e. cut down) the students in St. Petersburg, as a lesion against the day when these young men would be officials over them. The story seemed incredible, but private letters have been re- ceived. from Russia confirming it. This is " divide et impera" with a vengeance, not merely race against race, but class against class. The danger is so great that the very Russian exiles are doing their best to repress the present excitement. They begin to fear that a weak, well-meaning ruler, corrupt ministers, ardent young men, and an uneducated population, will re-enact the tragedy of 1789, on a scale to which the French Revolution itself can afford no parallel. We are some- what more hopeful ourselves. Europe is now more educated than it was seventy years ago, and the experience we have bought with suffering may perhaps save bloodshed in the East. Above all, the Russian people have not lost faith in God as well as in their Government ; their rebellions will pretty cer- tainly be purely political, or at worst agrarian, in character. But we do dread lest a number of little Jacqueries in the provinces, followed by that worst of all anarchies where police is substituted for statesmanship, and complicated by rebellions in Poland, should undo the little work that has been aone since the death of Nicholas, and ' restore the Reign of Terror that existed in '48 throughout the empire. The next few months will perhaps decide whether this generation in Russia shall be free or miserable. Let the Czar clearly understand that it is not sufficient for him to have meant well, that he must think largely and act vigorously if he would not ruin the great nation that welcomed him as its father to the throne. He is never likely, we believe, to misrule as his father misruled ; the remembrance of that dishonoured death-bed in the Hermitage will stand between him and actual tyranny. But there is danger lest he should sink to be one of those who are neither absolutely good nor bad ; of the souls "without infamy and without praise," who stand in Dante's great allegory, and shiver outside the circles of hell, while the angels pass by them and the devils corn their companionship.
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