Of all the heterogeneous elements that compose the immense empire of Russia, there is not one that ever seems likely to develop in the slightest degree the idea of liberalism; not a single nationality in which servilism is not innate, and to which the people themselves are not as much attached as the nations of the East to liberty. Hence it is that among the Russians, properly so-called, and who constitute the main portion of the population, we find the nobility infected with an inveterate sentiment of servile obsequiousness, and the people predisposed by temperament, and moulded by past experience, to the most abject submission. They all have the same character as the great princes of Kieff, who, when under the yoke of the Tartars, went to receive the investiture of the Khan of the Horde d'Or; and who, after having held his stirrup and offered him a glass of koumys, [Footnote 209] were obliged to lick from the neck of his horse the milk that dropped from his moustaches. Do we need greater evidence of the servility of the Russian people than the reign of the crowned tiger, Ivan IV. the Terrible, a despot without parallel in history, whose subjects, more patient than the Romans under Caligula and Nero, not only were contented to bear with his follies and crimes, but actually supplicated him to resume the throne, after his voluntary abdication through disgust of others and himself? The reign, too, of Peter the Great, whose savage grandeur could not absolve him from cruelty, and even the possibility in the nineteenth century of such a despot as Nicholas I., what greater proofs do we require?
[Footnote 209: Camel's milk fermented.]
As to the half-savage nations of the northern limits of Russia and Siberia, with populations perhaps only yesterday awakened to anything like social life, their need is still, as with children, the master, and the ferule.
It is easy to understand, then, how a man armed like Nicholas with an iron will and immense authority, and comprehending perfectly the character of his people, should have conceived this superhuman idea of his own power. Never thwarted by the least resistance, only now and then by an occasional murmuring, we can need no better explanation of his apparently exaggerated despotism, of his inveterate faith in the sanctity of his domination, his conviction that in himself centred his whole empire, and the faculty, in fine, which he possessed in so great a degree, of entirely ignoring mankind.
One day, a short time before the Crimean war, at a grand military review at Krasnoe-Selo, the emperor, on horseback, presented his troops to the empress seated in her carriage. Suddenly appeared on the drill ground a cariole drawn by one horse, and out of which stepped a feld jaguer, (courier of the palace,) charged with two autographic letters from the King of Prussia to the emperor and empress. As the empress was the more easily approached, he handed her the first letter, and ran toward the emperor to present the second. But some steps from him he pauses, turns pale, and bursts into tears. The letter is lost.
Trembling from head to foot, he retraces his steps to try and find it, but the soldiers, the aides-de-camp, the horses, have already trodden it in the dust, and the precious envelope cannot be found.
"What ails that animal?" asked the emperor of one of his aides-de-camp.
"I do not know, sire."
"Well, go and ask him, and bring me his reply."
The aide-de-camp spurred his horse, and from the lips of the poor feld jaguer he learned that an autograph letter from the King of Prussia to the Emperor of Russia had been lost. He brought the czar the information.