Russia 



57 



specting the American war involving 

 the possible recognition of the Southern 

 Confederacy. When, soon afterwards, 

 the French and English ministers ap- 

 peared at the State Department together 

 his information prepared him to meet 

 them. Knowing their object, Mr Seward 

 politely avoided receiving them jointly 

 and adroitly turned one off with a dinner 

 invitation while he saw the other alone. 

 But the joint movement of the two gov- 

 ernments went on. Joint action on 

 neutrality pointed the way to joint ac- 

 tion on intervention. Who could meas- 

 ure the dangers of such a portentous 

 step ? Would Mr Lincoln's government, 

 already absorbed in a life-and-death 

 grapple with a giant rebellion, also ac- 

 cept the gage of war with the united 

 strength of the two great nations of 

 western Europe ? Could it hope to pre- 

 vail against these combined perils, or 

 would the unequal struggle leave the 

 Union irretrievably divided and broken ? 



That was the startling menace. Rus- 

 sia's feeling was known, and before the 

 blow was struck it was important to 

 know what Russia would do. Louis 

 Napoleon took steps to ascertain — I 

 have reason to believe through an auto- 

 graph letter to the Czar, Alexander 

 II, advising him that the French and 

 English governments believed the time 

 had come when they ought to mediate 

 or intervene between the North and 

 South, and inviting him to join in the 

 movement. The Czar declined to do so 

 unless Mr Lincoln's government should 

 request it. But the menace continued, 

 and thereupon the Russian fleet steamed 

 into the bay of New York and cast an- 

 chor within sight of Trinity spire. All 

 the world knew what that act meant ; 

 Louis Napoleon knew, and the threat- 

 ened intervention never came. 



This chapter of past judgments does 

 not justify any misjudgments now, but 

 it does impose the obligation of seeking 

 to pronounce present judgments in a 

 fair and just spirit. Russia is engaged 



at this hour in a foreign war which has 

 thus far been full of surprises and dis- 

 asters, and she is at the same time in the 

 throes of a domestic agitation which, let 

 us hope, will lead to a great advance 

 for the Empire. No treatment of the 

 general subject can ignore these phases, 

 and they will be the better understood 

 if we look at them against the back- 

 ground of the national structure and 

 organization and character. 



Russia is a country of extraordinary 

 contrasts ; of imperial splendor and of 

 widespread poverty,; of the magnifi- 

 cence of the court and of the squalor 

 of the moujik ; of the stately grand- 

 eur of St Petersburg or the pictur- 

 esque orientalism of Moscow, and of 

 the dreary, dead level of dull and end- 

 less plains ; of the highest culture 

 and the broadest ignorance ; of the 

 boundless treasures of the unequaled 

 Winter Palace, with its 500 opulent 

 rooms, or of imposing St Isaac's, with 

 its malachite columns and its golden 

 dome, and of the boundless destitution 

 of almost uncounted millions ; of the 

 literary genius of Poushkin and Gogol, 

 of Tourgenieff and Tolstoi, and of the 

 dense illiteracy of the masses ; of the 

 pictorial wonders of Verestchagin and 

 of the most primitive agricultural and 

 industrial arts — in a word, of the high- 

 est development of grace and culture in 

 social life and of the deepest penury and 

 hardship on the broad national field. 



And as it is a country of extremes in 

 condition so it has been portrayed in 

 extremes of opinion. On the one hand 

 it has been painted in the blackest of 

 colors. It has been pictured as a land 

 of Tartar barbarism and of Muscovite 

 tyranny, where the Siberian exile is the 

 expression of all cruelty and the Jewish 

 proscription as the embodiment of all 

 intolerance and persecution. Its gov- 

 ernment has been described as a des- 

 potism tempered by assassination. On 

 the other hand it has been delineated 

 in some quarters as a benign and patri- 



