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

its liberty to observe more attentively, and to refleet with less distraction ?

The man who observes society from a distance is more lucid in his judgments than he who exposes himself, throughout his life, to the rough contact of the political machine. Men of action observe only by memory, and think only of describing when they have retired from the scene; and then, soured by disappointment, or feeling their end approaching, fatigued, or still a prey to fits of hope, the futile return of which is an inexhaustible source of deception, they almost always keep to themselves the treasures of their experience.

Had I been taken to Petersburg by the course of business, should I have seen in so short a time the reverse of things as I now see it ? Shut up in the circles of diplomatists, I should have surveyed this land from their point of view, I should have devoted all my thoughts to the affair in hand, I should have been interested in conciliating their good will by the utmost facility of manners; and all this management could not have operated for any length of time without reacting upon the judgment of him who was under its constraint. I should have ended by persuading myself that on many points I thought as they thought, were it only to excuse myself in my own eyes for the weakness of speaking as they spoke. Opinions that you dare not refute, however ill-founded you may find them at first, will finally modify your own; when politeness is carried so far as to become blindly tolerant, it is a treason against self; it perverts the views of the observer, whose business it is to represent persons and things not as he would have