loved freedom more than
wealth and ease. It is reported of one of the political prisoners, a
nobleman, that he died in Kamtschatka with a chain round his neck,
fastened to the wall. Others had been sent to the Caucasus, which in
Russia was long ago said to be "not so much a frontier as a grave-yard."
There they had fallen in a hateful war against brave, independent
mountain tribes, as the unwilling tools of an aggressive tyranny. Still,
some of the sufferers were yet alive--among them men of the foremost
families of the country. They had to be allowed to come back. They
came--mere shadows and ruins of their former selves. But their decrepit
condition was the most telling evidence of the infamy of the Tyrant who
had fortunately passed away.

In the salons of the upper classes these suffering witnesses of a
terrible past received lavish proofs of admiration. Men would listen
with sympathetic avidity to the tales of horror told by them. All those
present at such a gathering made it a point to be profuse towards the
martyrs with little attentions such as only women ordinarily receive
from the other sex. Thirty years--a long time--had passed since the
armed struggle in the streets of St. Petersburg. Now, all of a sudden,
memories were revived. Political tendencies, which some imagined had
died out, came up afresh among a younger generation, for whom the
"December Conspiracy" was surrounded with a poetical halo. There was
danger in the air for the autocratic principle.

Count Rostoptchin, the same who ordered the burning of Moscow in 1812,
said in 1825 he could not understand that attempt at a revolution. He
"could understand the French Revolution, because there the ordinary
citizen wished to become an aristocrat, but he could not conceive
aristocrats wishing to become simple burghers." That was the version of
a cynical, though otherwise clever, member of the nobility, who was
unable to comprehend the spirit of self-sacrifice for noble aims showing
itself even among the wealthy and the "noble" by birth. However, had
Count Rostoptchin only been capable of feeling the degradation under
which the Russian aristocracy itself lies in its relations with a
despotic Crown, he might, even from his own point of view as a mere man
of the world, have found a reason for the uprising of independent
characters among men of his own rank.

IV.

The more cultured and wealthier classes again came to the front as
political agitators, at t