d by our acts of emancipation? It is true
he has freed more than twenty millions of serfs in his empire, and,
though following the dictates of political necessity, he may have acted
with no more real anti-slavery sentiment than that which makes many
avowed pro-slavery men emancipationists among ourselves, yet he
certainly has achieved a noble glory, which even his monstrous reign in
Poland may not entirely blot out from the pages of history. The same
friendly disposition toward the United States was, however,
ostentatiously evinced by Nicholas, who lived and died the true
representative and guardian of unmitigated tyranny; it was as
ostentatiously shown by Alexander at the time when Fremont's
proclamation was repudiated as it is now, after the first of January,
1863; and it is he of all the monarchs of Europe who, as early as July,
1861, diplomatically advised this country to save the Union by
compromise, as neither of the contending parties could be finally
crushed down; that is to say, flagrantly to sacrifice _liberty_ in order
to save _power_. The Russian nobility will naturally sympathize with the
slaveholders of the South, and the lower classes of the Russian people
are too ignorant to think about transatlantic affairs. Russian imperial
and diplomatic sympathy will cordially be bestowed upon any nation and
cause which promises to become hostile to England (or, on a given time,
to France), on Nena Sahib no less than on Abraham Lincoln. The
never-discarded aim of Russia to plant its double cross on the banks of
the Byzantine Bosporus, and its batteries on those of the Hellespont,
and thus to transfer its centre of gravity from the secluded shores of
the Baltic to the gates of the Mediterranean; the never-slumbering dread
of this expansion, which has made the integrity of Turkey an inviolable
principle with the British statesmen of every sect; and the growing
inevitability of a bloody collision on the fields of central Asia of the
two powers, one of which is master of the north, and the other of the
south of that continent, have rendered Russia and Great Britain
inveterate foes. To strengthen itself against its deadliest opponent,
one courts the alliance of France, the other that of the American Union,
both not from sympathy, but in spite of inveterate or natural antipathy.
Against a common enemy we have seen the pope allying himself with the
sultan. Russia always hates England, and from time to time fears France;
both