As a dream disappears at dawn, so died this enthusiasm. The brief moment of promise was followed by an eternal hour of despair; the short day was succeeded by the endless night. Hell may not be Hell, but a Romanoff is a Romanoff. Only one year later, the despot in Alexander awoke—mature and monstrous. If the dead could touch the living, Nicholas would have hugged his son. The steps of the scaffold became slippery with the blood of the best. The rope of the hangman was jerked day and night, and the key of the jailer creaked in a thousand locks. Reaction had won, and liberalism lay covered with a crimson shroud.
The Valuev volcano vomited its smothering lava as far as Siberia, and General Kukel who with Kropotkin's help was preparing a long list of necessary reforms, was dismissed from his post because another place had been found for him—in prison.
On the other hand there was a district chief who robbed the peasants and whipped their wives, and whose brutality and dishonesty were so unanswerably exposed by the energetic Kropotkin that this officer was also transfered—to a higher position in Kamchatka where he found more roubles for his purse and more women for his knout.
When Kropotkin returned to St. Petersburg on an official commission, a high functionary said to him, "Do you know that Chernishevsky has been arrested? He is now in the fortress."
"Chernishevsky? What has he done?"
"Nothing in particular, nothing! But mon cher, you know—state considerations!... Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a government cannot tolerate that: that's impossible! intolerable mon cher, dans un Etat bien ordonné!"[8]
For these mad acts of a drunken despotism, there was neither shadow of excuse nor shade of reason, except that a Romanoff was hungry and thirsty for victims, satisfying the blood-craving spirit that cried within him, demanding that the brightest youths and the noblest girls be changed to lifeless corpses.
Is it any wonder that men who on the great day of emancipation quoted with tears in their eyes the beautiful article by Herzen,[9] "Thou hast conquered, Galilean," now recited these other words by the same exile: "Alexander Nikolaevich, why did you not die on that day? Your name would have been transmitted in history as that of a hero."