ceaseless career of conquest,
out-Tatar the Tatar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the
order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in
these Turkestan campaigns:--"_Kill all; spare no age, or sex!_" Witness
also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head
of Holy Russia, the magnanimous Champion of Religion and Humanity, made
his victorious entry into Plevna,[48] carousing there jubilantly,
whilst the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two
days--a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony.

I have anticipated for a moment the course of events. In glancing at the
reign of Alexander II., the eye involuntarily runs over the full
panorama of tyrannic outrages. From the time of the wholesale
proscription of the Tcherkess and Abchasian tribes to the heart-rending
horrors committed against Toork populations and wounded Ottoman
prisoners of war, there has been, in his career, a perfect climax of
inhumanity. Conferences for the professed humanization of warfare were,
with him, only the hypocritical precursors of fresh barbarities. But it
is not necessary to forestall events. Enough was done in the way of
atrocities even in the earlier years of his rule.

Between the conquests made in the Caucasus and the annexations on the
Amoor or in Central Asia, Alexander II. bullied, and at last put down,
by unspeakably cruel means,--even as did his predecessor,--the national
aspirations of unhappy Poland. Like Nicholas, he kept the road to
Siberia alive with the wretched convoys of unfortunate exiles. Even in
the Baltic Provinces, whence the Russian Government draws so many able
administrators, diplomatists, and military leaders, whose capacities
might be employed in a better cause, he began a system of persecution
against the German population, of so galling a nature that it
threatened, in course of time, to alienate that very mainstay of the
public administration. The special towns' charters of the Baltic
Provinces were infringed. The German tongue, hitherto possessing full
privileges, was threatened. A process of Russification was attempted;
the superior civilized element being pushed and annoyed by the inferior
and barbarous one.

These acts of the earliest years of the reign of Alexander II. have to
be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were
not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the Serf Emancipation
measure. On his