I sacrifice my nights to relate to my friends the objects that strike me during the day. My chapter is not finished, and dawn already appears.
The contrasts in this empire are abrupt; so much so that the peasant and the lord do not seem to belong to the same land: the grandees are as cultivated as if they lived in another country ; the serfs are as ignorant and savage as though they served under lords like themselves.
It is much less with the abuses of aristocracy that H 3
150 WANT OF A BENEFICENT ARISTOCRACY.
I reproach, the Russian government, than with the absence of an authorised aristocratic power, whose attributes are clearly and constitutionally defined. Recognised political aristocracies have always struck me as being beneficent in their influence; whilst the aristocracies that have no other foundation than the chimeras, or the injustices of privileges, are pernicious because their attributes remain undefined and ill regulated. It is true the Russian lords are masters, and too absolute masters, in their territories ; whence arise those excesses that fear and hypocrisy conceal by humane phrases, softly pronounced, which deceive travellers, and too often the government also. But these men, though monarchs in their far distant domains, have no power in the state ; they do what they please on their own estates, defying the power of the emperor, by corrupting or intimidating his secondary agents ; but the country is not governed by them; they enjoy no consideration in the general direction of affairs. It is only by becoming courtiers, by labouring for promotion in the tchinn, that they can obtain any public credit or standing. This life of the courtier excludes all elevation of sentiment, independence of spirit, and humane, patriotic views, which are essential elements of aristocratic bodies legally constituted, in states organised to extend their power and to flourish long.
The government, on the other hand, equally excludes the just pride of the man who has made his fortune by his labour. It unites all the disadvantages of democracy with those of despotism, and rejects every thing that is good in both systems.
Russia is governed by a class of subaltern employes,
BUREAUCRACY.
151
transferred direct from the public schools to the public administration. These individuals, who are very frequently the sons of men born in foreign lands, are noble so soon as they wear a cross at their button-hole; and it is only the Emperor who gives this decoration. Invested with the magical sign, they become proprietors of lands and of men; and thus obtaining power without obtaining also that heritage of magnanimity natural in a chieftain born and habituated to command, the new lords use their authority like upstarts as they are, and render odious to the nation, and the world, the system of servitude established in Russia, at the period when ancient Europe began to destroy her feudal institutions. By virtue of their offices, these despots oppress the country with impunity, and incommode even the Emperor; who perceives, with astonishment, that he is not so powerful as he imagined, though he dares not complain or even confess it to himself. This is the bureaucracy, a power terrible every where, because its abuses are always made in the name of order, but more terrible in Russia than any where else. When we see administrative tyranny substituted for Imperial despotism, we may tremble for a land where is established, without counterbalance, the system of government propagated in Europe under the French Empire.
The emperors of Russia, equally mistaken in their confidence and their suspicion, viewed the nobles as rivals, and sought only to find slaves in the men they needed for ministers. Hence has sprung up the swarms of obscure agents who labour to govern the land in obedience to ideas not their own; from which it n 4
152CHILDEEN OF THE POPES.
follows that they can never satisfy real wants. This class of employes, hostile in their hearts to the order of things which they direct, are recruited in a great measure from among the sons of the popes* — a body of vulgar aspirants, of upstarts without talent, for they need no merit to oblige the state to disembarrass itself of the burden which they are upon it; people who approach to all the. ranks without possessing any; minds which participate alike in the popular prejudices and the aristocratic pretensions, without having the energy of the one or the wisdom of the other: to include all in one clause, the sons of the priests are revolutionists charged with maintaining the established order.
Half enlightened, liberal as the ambitious, as fond of oppressing as the slave, imbued with crude philosophical notions utterly inapplicable to the country which they call their own, though all their sentiments and s`emi- enlightened ideas come from abroad, these men are urging the nation towards a goal of which they are perhaps ignorant themselves, which the Emperor has never imagined, and which is not one that true Russians or true friends of humanity will desire.
This permanent conspiracy dates as far back as the time of Napoleon. The political Italian had foreseen the danger of the Russian power; and wishing to weaken the enemy of revolutionised Europe, he had recourse in the first place to the influence of ideas. He profited by his friendly relations
PROPAGANDISE! OP NAPOLEON. 153
under pretext of aiding in the accomplishment of the Emperor's designs, a great number of political workmen,—a kind of masked army, charged with secretly preparing the way for our soldiers. These skilful intriguers were instructed to mix themselves up with the government, and especially with the system of public education, and to instil into the minds of the rising generation doctrines opposed to the political religion of the land. Thus did the great warrior — heir to the French revolution and foe to the liberties of the world—throw from afar the seeds of trouble and of discord, because the unity of despotism appeared to him a dangerous weapon in the military government which constitutes the immense power of Russia.
That empire is now reaping the fruit of the slow and profound policy of the adversary it flattered itself that it had conquered, — an adversary whose posthumous machiavelisni survives reverses unheard of in the history of human Avars. To the secretly-working influence of these pioneers of our armies, and to that of their children and their disciples, I attribute in a great measure the revolutionary ideas which have taken root in many families, and even in the army; and the explosion of which has produced the conspiracies that we have seen hitherto breaking themselves against the strength of the established government. Perhaps I deceive myself, but I feel persuaded that the present Emperor will triumph over these ideas, by crushing, even to the last man, those who defend them.
I was far from expecting to find in Russia such vestiges of our policy, and to hear from the mouths of Russians reproaches similar to those that the Spall 5
154PEOPAGANDISM OF NAPOLEOtf*
niards have addressed to us for thirty-five years past, If the mischievous intentions which the Russians attribute to Napoleon were real, no interest, no patriotism could justify them. We cannot save one part of the world by deceiving the other. Our religious propagandism appears to me sublime, because the Catholic church accords with every form of government and every degree of civilisation, over which it reigns with all the superiority of mind
