[1818 A.D.] "upon the freedom of thought and of writing, but solely so as to take requisite measures against the abuse of such freedom.' The entire statute contained forty-seven paragraphs-a circumstance worthy of attention if we take into consideration the fact that the censorship statute presented in the year 1826 by A. S. Shishkov had grown to 230 paragraphs. According to the statute of Alexander I the censorship was designed chiefly to "furnish society with books and works contributing to the true enlightenment of minds and to the formation of moral qualities, and to remove books and works of contrary tendencies." The censorship was entrusted to the university, constituting in its general jurisdiction the then newly organised department of the ministry of public instruction, which had the chief direction of schools. The basis of the functions of the censorship thus constituted was found in the three provisions following:

(1) Watchfulness that in the books and periodicals published, and in the pieces represented on the stage "there shall be nothing against religion, the government, morality, or the personal honour of any citizen." (2) Čare that in the prohibition of the publication or issue of books and works the committee shall be "guided by a wise indulgence, setting aside all biased interpretation of the works or of any part of them which might seem to merit prohibition; and wisdom to remember that when such parts seem subject to any doubt or have a double meaning, it is better to interpret them in the manner most favourable to the author than to prosecute him." (3) A discreet and wise investigation of truths concerning faith, mankind, the position of the citizen, the law, and all branches of the administration, are to be treated by the censorship not only in the most lenient manner, but should enjoy entire liberty of publication, as contributing to the progress of enlightenment."

Such was the aspect of the censorship and statute which remained unchanged for more than twenty years, that is during the whole reign of the emperor Alexander. It was only from the year 1817, from the establishment of the ministry of public worship and of public instruction, that the censorship acquired a particularly irksome tendency which was in opposition to the liberal spirit of the statute: the most complete intolerance, fanaticism, and captiousness, which had been absent at the commencement of Alexander's reign, then made their appearance.

In January, 1818 the emperor Alexander came for a short time to St. Petersburg, and Karamzin took advantage of his stay in order to present to him the eight volumes of the History of the Russian Empire which he had just published. "He received me in his private apartments, and I had the happiness of dining with him," wrote Karamzin to his friend I. I. Dmitriev. "On the 1st of February my History of the Russian Empire was on sale; the edition was of three thousand copies, and in spite of the high price at which the work was sold (55 rubles, paper money, per copy), a month later not a copy was left at the booksellers."b

FAILURE OF THE POLISH EXPERIMENT

The constitution granted to Poland in 1815, based the government on a tripartite division of power; the three estates of the realm being the king, a senate, and a house of representatives - the latter two being comprehended under the name of a diet. The executive was vested in the king, and in functionaries by him appointed. The crown was hereditary; it was the prerogative of the king to declare war, convoke, prorogue, or dissolve the diet. He was empowered to appoint a viceroy, who, unless a member of the royal

[1818 A.D.]

family, was to be a Pole. The king or viceroy was assisted by a council of state and five responsible ministers, their several departments being instruction, justice, interior and police, war, finance. These five ministers were subordinate to the president of the council. Considering the exhaustion, humiliation, and misery to which Poland had been reduced, such a constitution was apparently a great boon, for it guaranteed civil, political, and religious freedom; but by the very nature of things it was foredoomed to destruction.

The first Polish diet assembled at Warsaw on the 27th of March, 1818. The grand duke Constantine, commander-in-chief of the Polish army, was elected a deputy by the faubourg of Praga, and during the session was obliged to renounce his privilege as a senator, because, by the terms of the constitution, no person could sit in both houses. He was elected by a major

ity of 103 votes to 6, an evident proof that the new reign had excited the liveliest hopes. The emperor arrived at Warsaw on the 13th of March; he devoted himself laboriously to the examination of state affairs, and .on the 27th he opened the diet in person with a speech in the French language. He said, "the organisation which existed in vigorous maturity in your country permitted the instant establishment of what I have given you, by putting into operation the principles of those liberal institutions which have never ceased to be the object of my solicitude, and whose salutary influence I hope by the aid of God to disseminate through all the countries which He has confided to my care. Thus you have afforded me the means of showing my country what I had long since prepared for her, and what she shall obtain when the elements of a work so important shall have attained their necessary development."

There is no reason to doubt that Alexander cherished these intentions in his own sanguine but impractical way. The enfranchisement of the serfs of Esthonia, undertaken in 1802 and completed in 1816, and that of the serfs of Courland in 1817, exhibit the same principles. And when in 1819 the deputies of the Livonian nobility submitted to the approbation of the emperor a plan to pursue the same course with the serfs of their province, the following

[1818 A.D.]

was his remarkable reply: "I am delighted to see that the nobility of Livonia have fulfilled my expectations. You have set an example that ought to be imitated. You have acted in the spirit of our age, and have felt that liberal principles alone can form the basis of the people's happiness."

"Such," says Schnitzler, "was constantly, during nearly twenty years, the language of Alexander. He deeply mourned the entire absence of all guarantees for the social well-being of the empire. His regret was marked in his reply to Madame de Staël, when she complimented him on the happiness of his people, who, without a constitution, were blessed with such a sovereign: 'I am but a lucky accident.'" After 1815 he was no longer even that.

A year had hardly elapsed from the time when Alexander had addressed the words we have quoted to the diet at Warsaw, ere the Poles began to complain that the constitution was not observed in its essential provisions; that their viceroy Zaionczek had but the semblance of authority, whilst all the real power was in the hands of the grand duke Constantine, and of Novosiltzov the Russian commissioner. The bitterness of their discontent was in proportion to the ardour of their short-lived joy. Russian despotism reverted to its essential conditions; the liberty of the press was suspended; and in 1819 the national army was dissolved. On the other hand, the spirit of opposition became so strong in the diet, that in 1820, a measure relating to criminal procedure, which was pressed forward with all the force of government influence, was rejected by a majority of 120 to 3. Thenceforth there was nothing but mutual distrust between Poland and Russia.

CONSTITUTIONAL PROJECTS

The institutions which Alexander had given to Poland worked no happy results, and those which he designed for Russia would have been little better. He failed to accomplish even the good which he might have effected without organic changes. But he felt himself arrested by innumerable difficulties. He often wanted instruments to carry out his will, oftener still the firmness to support them against court cabals. The immense distances to be traversed, which, according to Custine, the emperor Nicholas feels to be one of the plagues of his empire, presented the same obstacle to Alexander. Again, his desire to exercise European influence distracted his attention from his proper work at home, and the empire sank back into its old routine. Discouraged at last, and awakening as he grew older from some of the illusions of his youth, he gave way to indolence more and more. He saw himself alone, standing opposed to an immense festering corruption; in despair he ceased to struggle against it; and in the latter portion of his reign he grievously neglected the care of his government.

The helm thus deserted by the pilot passed into the hands of General Araktcheiev, a shrewd, active man, devoted to business, perhaps also wellintentioned, but a Russian of the old school, without the necessary enlightenment, without political probity arbitrary, imperious, and enthralled by qualities and notions inimical to progress; governed, moreover, by unworthy connections of a particular kind. Under the rule of Araktcheiev the censorship became more severe than ever. Foreign books were admitted with difficulty, and were subject to tyrannical restrictions; many professors of the new university of St. Petersburg were subjected to a despotic and galling inquisition; others were required most rigidly to base their course of instructions upon a programme printed and issued by the supreme authority. Free

[1819 A.D.]

masonry was suppressed. Foreign travellers were surrounded with troublesome and vexatious formalities. Many rigorous regulations, which had been long disused and almost forgotten, were revived. In short, Araktcheiev exercised with intolerable severity a power which he derived from a master who carried gentleness to an extreme of weakness-who loved to discuss the rights of humanity, and whose heart bled for its sufferings.

THE MILITARY COLONIES (1819 A.D.)

It was by the advice of Araktcheiev that military colonies were established in Russia in 1819. The system was not new, for Austria had already adopted it on some of her frontiers; but its introduction into Russia was a novelty from which great results were expected, and which neighbouring states regarded with much uneasiness. The plan was to quarter the soldiers upon the crown-peasants, build military villages according to a fixed plan, apportion a certain quantity of field to every house, and form a statute-book, according to which these new colonies should be governed. The plan at once received the approbation of the czar. It was the intention of Araktcheiev, by means of these colonies, to reduce the expense entailed by the subsistence of the army, and to compel the soldier to contribute to his own maintenance by cultivating the soil; to strengthen the ranks by a reserve picked from among the crown-peasants, equal in number to the colony of soldiers; to furnish the soldier with a home, in which his wife and children might continue to dwell when the exigencies of war called him away; and to increase the population, and with it the cultivation of the soil, in a land where hands only are wanting to change many a steppe into a garden, many a scattered village into a thriving town.

In

Russian colonies were thus established in the governments of Novgorod, Mohilev, Kharkov, Kiev, Podolia, and Kherson; that is to say, in the neighbourhood of Poland, Austria, and Turkey. Political and military considerations had combined to fix the choice of localities for these colonies. consequence of the vast dimensions of the Russian Empire, troops raised in the north and west can only reach the southern provinces after long intervals; and if, on any emergency, Russia should wish to concentrate a large part of her forces in the neighbourhood of the southern and western frontiers, such a concentration, it was thought, would be greatly facilitated by the fact of military colonies, with a large population, being already on the spot. The villages destined for the reception of military colonies were all to be inhabited by crown-peasants; these people were now relieved from the duties they had been accustomed to pay to the government, in consideration of their quartering men in their houses. All peasants more than fifty years of age were selected to be so-called head colonists, or master-colonists. Every master-colonist received forty acres of land, for which he had to maintain a soldier and his family, and to find fodder for a horse, if a corps of cavalry happened to be quartered in the village. The soldier, on his part, was bound to assist the colonist in the cultivation of his field and the farm labours generally, whenever his military duties did not occupy the whole day. The soldier, who in this way became domiciliated in the family, received the name "military peasant." The officers had the power of choosing the soldiers who were to be quartered upon the master-colonists. If the colonist had several sons, the oldest became his adjunct; the second was enrolled among the reserve; the third might become a military peasant; the others were enrolled

[1819 A.D.]

as colonists or pupils. Thus, in the new arrangements, two entirely different elements were fused together, and one population was, so to speak, engrafted upon another.

The labour of these agricultural soldiers is of course dependent upon the will of the officers, for they can only attend to agricultural work when freed from military duty. The man himself continues half peasant, half soldier, until he has served for five-and-twenty years, if he be a Russian, or twenty years if he be a Pole. At the expiration of this time he is at liberty to quit the service, and his place is filled up from the reserve. Beside the house of each master-colonist stands another dwelling constructed in exactly the same manner, and occupied by the reserve-man, who may be regarded as a double of the soldier. He is selected by the colonel of the regiment from among the peasants, and is generally a son or relation of the master-colonist. The reserve-man is instructed in all the duties appertaining to the soldier's profession, and is educated in every particular, so that he may be an efficient substitute. If the agricultural soldier dies, or falls in battle, his reserve-man immediately takes his place. The colonist now takes the place of the reserveman, who in his turn is succeeded by the pupil. The master-colonist, peasantsoldier, and reserve-man, may all choose their wives at pleasure, and they are encouraged to marry. The women, on the other hand, are allowed to marry within the limits of their colony, but not beyond it. The sons of the mastercolonists, soldiers, or reserve-men, between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, are called "cantonists." They are drilled like soldiers, and occasionally attend schools. The children between the ages of eight and thirteen visit the school of the village in which their parents dwell, and are exercised in the use of arms on alternate days. Like the cantonists, they wear uniforms, and are looked upon as future soldiers. All male children are sent to school, where, by the method of reciprocal education, they are taught to read, write, and cipher, alternately with their military studies. They are taught to recite a kind of catechism, setting forth the duties of the soldier; they learn the use of the sabre; are practised in riding, and, when they have attained the age of seventeen years, are mustered in the head-quarters of the regiment, and divided into corps, those who distinguish themselves by attention and diligence being appointed officers. The several component parts of a colony are as follows:

1. The head colonist-the master of the house and possessor of the estate. 2. His assistant, who joins him in the cultivation of his farm. 3. The military peasant, who likewise takes part in agricultural labour. 4. The reserve-man, who supplies the place of the soldier in case of need. 5. The cantonist, between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. 6. The boys, from eight to thirteen years old. 7. Male children under the age of eight years. 8. The female population. 9. The invalids.

The colonies in the south of Russia comprise 380 villages in the provinces of Kherson, Kharkov, and Iekaterainoslav. The crown has here 30,000 peasants. Every village contains two or three squadrons, according to its size; thus they contain altogether 80,000 men. These military districts, as the regions are called in which the colonies occur, are so strictly divided from the remaining portions of the provinces, that no man can enter them without a special passport, granted by the military authorities. Their constitution is entirely military, even the postal service being executed by soldiers. At every station a subaltern receives the order for post-horses and inspects it; another soldier harnesses the horses; a third greases the wheels; and a fourth mounts the box as coachman. As soon as the military coat appears in sight, every