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

6IMMENSE POWER ОГ THE EMPEROR.

breathe, and dictates to them the mode of using this permission. It is the divine right, applied to the mechanism of social life. Such is the serious side of the representation, wherein are involved incidents of so grave a nature, that fear soon extinguishes the inclination to laughter.

There does not exist on the earth at the present time, not in Turkey, not even in China, a single man who enjoys and exercises such power as the emperor. Let the reader figure to himself all the skilfulness of our governments, perfected as they are by centuries of practice, put into exercise in a still young and uncivilised society; the rubrics of the administrations of the West, aiding by modern experience the despotism of the East; European discipline supporting the tyranny of Asia; the police employed in concealing barbarism, in order, not to destroy, but to perpetuate it; disciplined brute force and the tactics of European armies, serving to strengthen an Eastern policy;—let him conceive the idea of a half-savage people who have been enrolled and drilled, without having been civilised, and he will be able to understand the social and moral state of the Russian nation. To profit by the progressive discoveries in the art of governing made by the European nations, in order to rule sixty millions of Orientals, has been from the time of Peter the First the problem to be studied by those who govern Russia.

The reigns of Catharine the Great and of Alexander did but prolong the systematic infancy* of this nation, which still exists only in name.

* L'enfance systépiatiqu