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

SPIRIT OF RUSSIAN SOCIAL ORDER.233

idea of his possessing, this prince must suffer mentally as well as physically. With reference to him may be applied the words of Champfort, —" In the life of man, an age inevitably arrives at which the heart must either break or harden."

The Russian people give me the idea of being men endowed with gentle dispositions, but who believe themselves bom exclusively for violence. With the easy indifference of the Orientals they unite a taste for the arts, which is tantamount to saying that nature has given them the desire of liberty; whilst their masters have made them the machines of oppression. A man, as soon as he rises a grade above the common level, acquires the right, and, furthermore, contracts the obligation to maltreat his inferiors, to whom it is his duty to transmit the blows that he receives from those above him. Thus does the spirit of iniquity descend from stage to stage down to the foundations of this unhappy society, which subsists only by violence—a violence so great, that it forces the slave to falsify himself by thanking his tyrant; and this is what they here call public order; in other words, a gloomy tranquillity, a fearful peaee, for it resembles that of the tomb. The Russians, however, are proud of this calm. So long as a man has not made up his mind to go on all-fours, he must necessarily pride himself in something, were it only to preserve his right to the title of a human creature.

By a spirit of reaction against the doctrines of Christianity, the world has become, especially during the last century, of one accord in extolling ambition, as though it were not the most cruel, the most unmerciful of the passions, and as though society were in