So, at last, Nicholas folded his arms and wrestled no more. For, apart from the trouble, there came ever in his dealings with thieves that old timid thought of his, that, if he examined too closely their thief-tenure, they might examine too closely his despot-tenure.
We have shown this vague fear in Nicholas's mind, thus at length and in different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key to his dealings with the serf-system.
Toward his toiling millions Nicholas always showed sympathy. Let news of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian majesty, and woe to the guilty master! Many of these wrongs came to Nicholas's notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to undermine it.
Opposition met him, of course,—not so much the ponderous laziness of Peter's time as an opposition polite and elastic, which never ranted and never stood up,—for then Nicholas would have throttled it and stamped upon it. But it did its best to entangle his reason and thwart his action.
He was told that the serfs were well fed, well housed, well clothed, well provided with religion,—were contented, and had no wish to leave their owners.
Now Nicholas was not strong at spinning sham reason nor subtle at weaving false conscience; but, to his mind, the very fact that the system had so degraded a man that he could laugh and dance and sing, while other men took his wages and wife and homestead, was the crowning argument against the system.
Then the political economists beset him, proving that without forced labor Russia must sink into sloth and poverty.[I]
[Footnote I: For choice specimens of these reasonings, see Von Erman, Archiv für Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland.]
Yet all this could not shut out from Nicholas's sight the great black fact in the case. He saw, and winced as he saw, that, while other European nations, even under despots, were comparatively active and energetic, his own people were sluggish and stagnant,—that, although great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or builders, or inventors, but only those two main products of Russian civilization,—dissolute lords and abject serfs.
But what to do? Nicholas tried to help his Empire by setting right any individual wrongs whose reports broke their way to him.