unt to be tolerated. Nicholas never
suspected that a ruler, however well-intentioned, energetic, and legally
autocratic he may be, can do but little without the co-operation of
his people. Experience constantly showed him the fruitlessness of his
efforts, but he paid no attention to its teachings. He had formed
once for all his theory of government, and for thirty years he acted
according to it with all the blindness and obstinacy of a reckless,
fanatical doctrinaire. Even at the close of his reign, when the terrible
logic of facts had proved his system to be a mistake--when his armies
had been defeated, his best fleet destroyed, his ports blockaded, and
his treasury well-nigh emptied--he could not recant. "My successor," he
is reported to have said on his deathbed, "may do as he pleases, but I
cannot change."

Had Nicholas lived in the old patriarchal times, when kings were the
uncontrolled "shepherds of the people," he would perhaps have been
an admirable ruler; but in the nineteenth century he was a flagrant
anachronism. His system of administration completely broke down. In vain
he multiplied formalities and inspectors, and punished severely the few
delinquents who happened by some accident to be brought to justice; the
officials continued to pilfer, extort, and misgovern in every possible
way. Though the country was reduced to what would be called in Europe
"a state of siege," the inhabitants might still have said--as they are
reported to have declared a thousand years before--"Our land is great
and fertile, but there is no order in it."

In a nation accustomed to political life and to a certain amount of
self-government, any approach to the system of Nicholas would, of
course, have produced wide-spread dissatisfaction and violent hatred
against the ruling power. But in Russia at that time no such feelings
were awakened. The educated classes--and a fortiori the uneducated--were
profoundly indifferent not only to political questions, but also to
ordinary public affairs, whether local or Imperial, and were quite
content to leave them in the hands of those who were paid for attending
to them. In common with the uneducated peasantry, the nobles had a
boundless respect--one might almost say a superstitious reverence--not
only for the person, but also for the will of the Tsar, and were ready
to show unquestioning obedience to his commands, so long as these did
not interfere with their accustomed mode of life. The Tsar d