ublication should find them. This was vile; but what followed was
diabolic. Court pets were let into the secret. These, by good promises,
enticed hosts of peasants to their estates. The edict was now sprung; in
an hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and
Catharine II was made infamous forever. So, about a century after Peter,
a wave of wrong rolled over Russia that not only drowned honor in the
nobility, but drowned hope in the people.

As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must
have sunk within them. For Paul I, Catharine's son and successor, was
infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained
by public opinion. He had been born with savage instincts, and educated
into ferocity. Tyranny was written on his features in his childhood. If
he remained in Russia his mother sneered and showed hatred of him; if he
journeyed in Western Europe crowds gathered about his coach to jeer at
his ugliness. Most of those who have seen Gillray's caricature of him,
issued in the height of English spite at Paul's homage to Bonaparte,
have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen the
portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps of St. Petersburg know well that
Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not.

And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought
into his every fibre. He demanded an oriental homage. As his carriage
whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop,
descend into the mud, and bow themselves. Himself threw his despotism
into this formula: "Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is no one
noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I speak."

And yet within that hideous mass glowed sparks of reverence for right.
When the nobles tried to get Paul's assent to more open arrangements for
selling serfs apart from the soil, he utterly refused; and when they
overtasked their human chattels Paul made a law that no serf should be
required to give more than three days in the week to the tillage of his
master's domain. But, within five years after his accession, Paul had
developed into such a ravenous wild beast that it became necessary to
murder him. This duty done, there came a change in the spirit of Russian
sovereignty as from March to May; but, sadly for humanity, there came at
the same time a change in the spirit of European politics, as from May
to March.

For