twenty-five. But a hundred
voices interrupted him, exclaiming that "the country required a greater
sacrifice; that they should grant one serf in ten, ready armed,
equipped, and supplied with provisions for three months." This was
offering, for the single government of Moscow, 80,000 men, and a great
quantity of warlike stores.

The latter proposition was immediately voted without discussion; some
say with enthusiasm; and that it was executed in like manner, so long as
the danger was at hand. Others attribute the consent of the assembly to
a sentiment of submission alone; which, indeed, in the presence of
absolute power, is apt to absorb every other.

They add, that on the breaking up of the meeting, the principal nobles
were heard to murmur among themselves against the extravagance of such a
measure. "Was the danger, then, so pressing? Did the Russian army,
which, as they were told, still numbered 400,000 men, no longer exist?
Why deprive them of so many peasants? The service of these men would be,
it is said, only temporary; but who could ever hope for their return?
and was not even this an event to be dreaded? Would these serfs,
habituated to the irregularities of war, bring back their former habits
of submission? Undoubtedly not; they would return full of new sentiments
and new ideas, with which they would infect the villages; they would
there propagate a refractory spirit, which would give infinite trouble
to the master by spoiling the slave."

Be this as it may, the resolution of the assembly was generous, and
worthy of so great a nation. The details are of little consequence. We
well know that it is the same everywhere; that everything in the world
loses by being seen too near; and, lastly, that nations should be judged
by the general mass and by results.

Alexander then addressed the merchants, but more briefly: he ordered the
proclamation to be read to them, in which Napoleon was represented as "a
perfidious wretch; a Moloch, who, with treachery in his heart and
loyalty on his lips, was striving to blot out Russia from the face of
the earth."

It is said that, at these words, his auditors, to whose strongly-marked
and flushed faces their long beards imparted a look at once antique,
majestic, and wild, were inflamed with rage. Their eyes flashed fire;
they were seized with a convulsive fury, of which their stiffened arms,
their clenched fists, the gnashing of their teeth, and their subdued
execrations, expr