eatest error is that I tried to gather the harvest before sowing
the seed"; and Ruileef, "I knew this enterprise would be my
destruction--but could no longer endure the sight of my country's
anguish under despotism." When we think of the magnitude of the
offense, the monstrous crime which was contemplated; and when we
remember that Nicholas was by nature the very incarnation of
unrestrained authority, the punishment seems comparatively light.
There was no vindictiveness, no wholesale slaughter. Five leaders were
deliberately and ignominiously hanged, and hundreds of their misguided
followers and sympathizers went into perpetual exile in Siberia--there
to expiate the folly of supposing that a handful of inexperienced
enthusiasts and doctrinaires could in their studies create new and
ideal conditions, and build up with one hand while they were recklessly
destroying with the other. Their aims were the abolition of serfdom,
the destruction of all existing institutions, and a perfect equality
under a constitutional government. They were definite and
sweeping--and so were the means for accomplishing them. Their benign
government was going to rest upon crime and violence. We should call
these men Nihilists now. There were among them writers and thinkers,
noble souls which, under the stress of oppression and sympathy, had
gone astray. They had failed, but they had proved that there were men
in Russia capable of dying for an ideal. When the cause had its
martyrs it had become sacred--and though it might sleep, it would not
die.

The man sitting upon the throne of Russia now was not torn by conflicts
between his ideals and inexorable circumstance. His natural instincts
and the conditions of his empire both pointed to the same simple
course--an unmitigated autocracy--an absolute rule supported by
military power. Instead of opening wider the doors leading into
Europe, he intended to close them, and if necessary even to lock them.
Instead of encouraging his people to be more European, he was going to
be the champion of a new Pan-Slavism and to strive to intensify the
Russian national traits. The time had come for this great empire to
turn its face away from the West and toward the East, where its true
interests were. Such a plan may not have been formulated by Nicholas,
but such were the policies instinctively pursued from the beginning of
his reign to its close.

Such an attitude naturally brought him at once into co