AS DESPATCH-BEARER IN WAR-TIME-1855 469 



at us in a sort of stupefaction. We expected to hear from 

 them afterward, but on reflection they evidently thought 

 it best not to stir the matter. 



In reviewing this first of my sojourns in Russia, my 

 thoughts naturally dwell upon the two sovereigns Nicho- 

 las I and Alexander II. The first of these was a great 

 man scared out of greatness by the ever recurring specter 

 of the French Revolution. There had been much to make 

 him a stern reactionary. He could not but remember that 

 two Czars his father and grandfather had both been 

 murdered in obedience to family necessities. At his proc- 

 lamation as emperor he had been welcomed by a revolt 

 which had forced him 



" To wade through slaughter to a throne " 



a revolt which had deluged the great parade-ground of 

 St. Petersburg with the blood of his best soldiers, which 

 had sent many coffles of the nobility to Siberia, and which 

 had obliged him to see the bodies of several men who 

 might have made his reign illustrious dangling from the 

 fortress walls opposite the Winter Palace. He had been 

 obliged to grapple with a fearful insurrection in Poland, 

 caused partly by the brutality of his satraps, but mainly 

 by religious hatreds; to suppress it with enormous car- 

 nage; and to substitute, for the moderate constitutional 

 liberty which his brother had granted, a cruel despotism. 

 He had thus become the fanatical apostle of reaction 

 throughout Europe, and as such was everywhere the im- 

 placable enemy of any evolution of constitutional liberty. 

 The despots of Europe adored him. As symbols of his 

 ideals, he had given to the King of Prussia and to the 

 Neapolitan Bourbon copies of two of the statues which 

 adorned his Nevsky bridge statues representing restive 

 horses restrained by strong men ; and the Berlin populace, 

 with an unerring instinct, had given to one of these the 

 name "Progress checked, " and to the other the name 

 ' * Retrogression encouraged. ' ' To this day one sees every- 



