AS ATTACHE! AT ST. PETERSBURG-1854-1855 465 



the fetishism controlling the lower classes, there was, espe- 

 cially in that period of calamity, a deep undertone of 

 melancholy. Melancholy, indeed, is a marked character- 

 istic of Russia, and, above all, of the peasantry. They 

 seem sad even in their sports ; their songs, almost without 

 exception, are in the minor key; the whole atmosphere is 

 apparently charged with vague dread of some calamity. 

 Despite the suppression of most of the foreign journals, 

 and the blotting out of page after page of the newspapers 

 allowed to enter the empire, despite all that the secret po- 

 lice could do in repressing unfavorable comment, it be- 

 came generally known that all was going wrong in the 

 Crimea. News came of reverse after reverse : of the de- 

 feats of the Alma and Inkerman, and, as a climax, the loss 

 of Sebastopol and the destruction of the Eussian fleet. In 

 the midst of it all, as is ever the case in Russian wars, 

 came utter collapse in the commissariat department; 

 everywhere one heard hints and finally detailed stories 

 of scoundrelism in high places : of money which ought to 

 have been appropriated to army supplies, but which had 

 been expended at the gambling-tables of Homburg or in 

 the Breda quarter at Paris. 



Then it was that there was borne in upon me the convic- 

 tion that Russia, powerful as she seems when viewed from 

 the outside, is anything but strong when viewed from the 

 inside. To say nothing of the thousand evident weaknesses 

 resulting from autocracy, the theory that one man, and 

 he, generally, not one of the most highly endowed, can do 

 the thinking for a hundred millions of people, there was 

 nowhere the slightest sign of any uprising of a great na- 

 tion, as, for instance, of the French against Europe in 

 1792, of the Germans against France in 1813 and in 1870, 

 of Italy against Austria in 1859 and afterward, and of the 

 Americans in the Civil War of 1861. There were cer- 

 tainly many noble characters in Russia, and these must 

 have felt deeply the condition of things ; but there being 

 no great middle class, and the lower class having been 

 long kept in besotted ignorance, there seemed to be no 

 force on which patriotism could take hold. 



I. 30 



