ellency is informed that the contemplated
repairs will cost two roubles and forty kopecks, or about five shillings
of our money. Even here the formalities do not stop, for the Government
must have the assurance that the architect who made the estimate and
superintended the repairs has not been guilty of negligence. A second
architect is therefore sent to examine the work, and his report, like
the estimate, requires to be confirmed by the council and the Procureur.
The whole correspondence lasts thirty days, and requires no less than
thirty sheets of paper! Had the person who desired the repairs been not
a Governor-General, but an ordinary mortal, it is impossible to say how
long the procedure might have lasted.*

* In fairness I feel constrained to add that incidents of
this kind occasionally occur--or at least occurred as late
as 1886--in our Indian Administration. I remember an
instance of a pane of glass being broken in the Viceroy's
bedroom in the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, and it would have
required nearly a week, if the official procedure had been
scrupulously observed, to have it replaced by the Public
Works Department.

It might naturally be supposed that this circuitous and complicated
method, with its registers, ledgers, and minutes of proceedings, must
at least prevent pilfering; but this a priori conclusion has been
emphatically belied by experience. Every new ingenious device had merely
the effect of producing a still more ingenious means of avoiding it.
The system did not restrain those who wished to pilfer, and it had a
deleterious effect on honest officials by making them feel that the
Government reposed no confidence in them. Besides this, it produced
among all officials, honest and dishonest alike, the habit of systematic
falsification. As it was impossible for even the most pedantic of
men--and pedantry, be it remarked, is a rare quality among Russians--to
fulfil conscientiously all the prescribed formalities, it became
customary to observe the forms merely on paper. Officials certified
facts which they never dreamed of examining, and secretaries gravely
wrote the minutes of meetings that had never been held! Thus, in the
case above cited, the repairs were in reality begun and ended long
before the architect was officially authorised to begin the work. The
comedy was nevertheless gravely played out to the end, so that any one
afterwards revising the documents