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

ciency : they are the first men of their country, both by the posts they occupy, and the superiority of their abilities. But, good heavens ! what is the object of all this management ? What sufficient motive shall we assign for so much stratagem? What duty, what recompence, can so long reconcile the faces of men to bear the fatigue of the mask ?

Can the play of so many batteries be destined to defend only a real and legitimate power? Such a power would not need it; truth can defend herself. Is it to protect the miserable interests of vanity? Perhaps it is; yet to take so much pains to attain so contemptible a result would be unworthy of the grave men to whom I allude: I attribute to them pro-founder views; I think I perceive a greater object, and one which better explains their prodigies of dissimulation and longanimity.

An ambition inordinate and immense, one of those ambitions which could only possibly spring in the bosoms of the oppressed, and coiüd only find nourishment in the miseries of a whole nation, ferments in the heart of the Russian people. That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations : the glory, the riches which it hopes for, consoles it for the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, upon his knees, dreams of the conquest of the world.

It is not the man who is adored in the Emperor Nicholas — it is the ambitious master of a nation more ambitious than himself. The passions of the