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

and useless). Assured of the necessaries of life for themselves and their children, they are a hundred times less to be pitied than the free peasants are among you.

I did not reply to this panegyric on servitude; but I thought, if they have no cares, they have also no families, and therefore no affections, no pleasures, no moral sentiment, no compensation for the physical evils of life. They possess nothing; though it is individual property which makes the social man, because it alone constitutes the divisions of family.

Moral truth is the only principle that merits our devotion : to grasp it, aÚ the efforts of the human mind tend, whatever may be their sphere of action. If, in my journeys, I take every pains to describe the world as it is, my object is to excite in the breasts of others, and in my own, regret that it is not as it should be, to arouse in human minds the sentiment of immortality, by recalling, at the sight of every injustice, every abuse inherent in the things of earth, the words of Jesus Christ, " My kingdom is not of this world."

Never have I had so frequent occasion to apply these words as since my sojourn in Russia; they occur to me at every moment. Under a despotism, all the laws are calculated to assist oppression ; that is to say, the more the oppressed has reason to complain, the less has he the legal right or the temerity. Surely, before God, the evil actions of a free citizen are more criminal than the evil actions of a serf. He who sees every tiling, takes into account the insensibility of conscience in the man debased by the spectacle of iniquity always triumphant.