n, and seem
always to have a fair amount of leisure time at their disposal.

Besides the unavoidable evils of excessive centralisation, Russia has
had to suffer much from the jobbery, venality, and extortion of the
officials. When Peter the Great one day proposed to hang every man who
should steal as much as would buy a rope, his Procurator-General frankly
replied that if his Majesty put his project into execution there would
be no officials left. "We all steal," added the worthy official; "the
only difference is that some of us steal larger amounts and more openly
than others." Since these words were spoken nearly two centuries
have passed, and during all that time Russia has been steadily making
progress, but until the accession of Alexander II. in 1855 little change
took place in the moral character of the administration. Some people
still living can remember the time when they could have repeated,
without much exaggeration, the confession of Peter's Procurator-General.

To appreciate aright this ugly phenomenon we must distinguish two kinds
of venality. On the one hand there was the habit of exacting what are
vulgarly termed "tips" for services performed, and on the other there
were the various kinds of positive dishonesty. Though it might not
be always easy to draw a clear line between the two categories, the
distinction was fully recognised in the moral consciousness of the
time, and many an official who regularly received "sinless revenues"
(bezgreshniye dokhodi), as the tips were sometimes called, would have
been very indignant had he been stigmatised as a dishonest man. The
practice was, in fact, universal, and could be, to a certain extent,
justified by the smallness of the official salaries. In some departments
there was a recognised tariff. The "brandy farmers," for example, who
worked the State Monopoly for the manufacture and sale of alcoholic
liquors, paid regularly a fixed sum to every official, from the Governor
to the policeman, according to his rank. I knew of one case where an
official, on receiving a larger sum than was customary, conscientiously
handed back the change! The other and more heinous offences were by no
means so common, but were still fearfully frequent. Many high officials
and important dignitaries were known to receive large revenues, to
which the term "sinless" could not by any means be applied, and yet they
retained their position, and were received in society with respectful
defer