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

OF POLITICAL FREEDOM.75

and this consideration stops me. My friend must therefore imagine what I do not relate ; or rather, to speak more correctly, that friend will never be able to imagine it. The excesses of despotism, which can alone give birth to the moral anarchy that here reigns around me, being only known by hearsay, their consequences would appear incredible. `\Vhere legitimate liberty is wanted, illegitimate liberty is sure to spring up ; where the use is interdicted, the abuse will certainly creep in : deny the right, and you create the fraud; refuse justice, and you open the door to crime.

Under the influence of these principles, Moscow is, of all the cities in Europe, the one in which the dissolute man of the fashionable world has the widest field for his career. The government is too well informed not to know that under an absolute rule some kind of revolt must somewhere break out; but it prefers that this revolt should be in manners rather than in politics. Here lies the secret of the licence of the one party and the tolerance of the other. The corruption of manners in Moscow has also other causes. One is, that the greater number of well-born, but, by their conduct, ill-famed persons, retire when disgraced, and here establish themselves.

After the orgies which our modern literature takes pleasure in depicting, if we are to believe the authors, with a moral intention, we ought to be familiar with all the feaüires of dissolute life. I pass over the question of the pretended utility of their aim; I can tolerate their long though useless sermons: but there is in literature something more dangeroits even than the immoral; it is the ignoble. If, under the pretext of provoking salutary reforms in the lowest classes E 2