Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

210IMPKOVEMENTS AT NIJNI.

towns and of many private individuals, great merchants, and others, emulous of contributing to the re-construction of a national edifice which serves as habitation for the head of the empire.

The reader may judge, by the detail which I have deemed it my duty to give of this tyrannical charlatanism, of the value here attached to words, and of the real worth of the noblest sentiments and the finest phrases. He may judge also of the constraint imposed upon generous minds and independent spirits, obliged to live under a system in which peace and order are purchased by the sacrifice of truth—that most sacred of all the gifts of heaven to man. In other communities, it is the people who apply the whip, and the government which puts on the drag; here, it is the government which urges onward and the people who hold back: for if the political machine is to keep together at all, it is essential that the spirit of conservatism should exist in some part of it. The displacement of ideas which I here note is a political phenomenon, which I have never seen except in Russia. Under an absolute despotism it is the government which is revolutionary; for the word revolution signifies arbitrary system and violent power.

The governor has kept his promise. He has taken me to see and minutely examine the works ordered by the emperor, with the view of making Nijni all that it is capable of being made, and of repairing the errors of its founders. A superb road rises from the banks of the Oka to the high city, the precipices are filled up, the terraces are laid out, magnificent openings are eut even in the bosom of the mountain,