discontent." The autocracy is "doomed." "The forces that undermine it
are cumulative and relentless." Its "true policy is to spread its
dissolution--after the manner of certain financial operations--over a
number of years." "The method of the change is really not of importance.
The vital matter is that the reform shall at once concede and
practically apply the principle of popular self-government, granting at
the same time the fullest rights of free speech and public assembly."
Finally, "the Tsar and his advisers" are bidden to "beware," since "the
spectacle of this frightfully unequal struggle ... is not lost upon
Europe, or even upon America."

The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus
rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with
the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little
attention he may have given to those of Russia in particular. The
institutions of Russia differ fundamentally from those of other European
states. But the difference lies in historical conditions and
development, not in the principles underlying all human society. No
people has ever had a permanent government of its own resting solely or
chiefly on force. Wherever autocracy has acquired a firm footing, it has
done so by suppressing anarchy, establishing order and authority, and
securing national unity and independence. Nowhere has it fulfilled these
conditions more completely than in Russia. It grew up when the country
was lying prostrate under the Tartar domination, and it supplied the
impulse and the means by which that yoke was thrown off. It absorbed
petty principalities, extinguished their conflicting ambitions, and
consolidated their resources; checked the migrations of a nomad
population, and brought discordant races under a common rule; repelled
invasions to which, in its earlier disintegrated condition, the nation
must have succumbed, and built up an empire hardly less remarkable for
its cohesion and its strength than for the vastness of its territory. In
a word, it performed, more rapidly and thoroughly, the same work which
was accomplished by monarchy between the eighth and the fifteenth
century in Western Europe. If its methods were more analogous to those
of Eastern despotisms than of European sovereignties, if its excesses
were unrestrained and its power uncurbed, this is only saying that
Russia, instead of sharing in the heritage of Roman civilization and