[1855A.D.]
The chivalrous soul of the Emperor Nicholas could not reconcile itself to the complete wreck of all its political and spiritual ideals. Nicholas fell a sacrifice to his persistent pursuit of traditions bequeathed to him by the Alexandrine policy of the last decade.
On the 2nd of March, 1855, Russia, and all European nations, were dismayed by the unexpected news of the sudden death of the emperor Nicholas.b“Serve Russia!” were his last words to his son and heir. “I wished to overcome all national afflictions, to leave you a peaceful, well-organized and happy empire.... Providence has ordained otherwise!”j
Nicholas I died as grandly as he had lived, in the firm assurance that he had done his duty. The nations of Europe watched him shining as a pillar of fire amid the clouds of anarchy which beset the dawn of his reign. They stood aghast at his aggressions on Turkey and the relentless severity with which he crushed the Polish and Hungarian rebellions. For a generation he was the sword drawn against revolution. He saved Austria from dismemberment, and checked the premature creation of a democratic German Empire. Diplomatists styled him the “Don Quixote of politics”; and his chivalrous spirit had much in common with that of Cervantes’ immortal hero. While he ruled his subjects with a rod of iron, he was ever ready to serve them with an unselfishness which has no parallel in history. But his attempt to stereotype the existing order of things failed because it infringed the law of nature which decrees that all organisms must advance or decay. As the nineteenth century wore on, bringing with it inventions which linked mankind in closer bonds and stimulated the exchange of thought, the czar of all the Russias became an anachronism.
Nicholas’s conceptions of his duties as a ruler were equally based on illusions. He strove to cut Russia adrift from Europe, to place her in quarantine against the contagion of western ideals. Here, again, he essayed the impossible. Thought defied his custom’s barriers, his censorship, his secret police; and Russia was already too deeply impregnated with foreign influences to take the bias which the autocrat sought to give her energies. But, despite the calamities which it brought on his people, Nicholas’s reaction served as a corrective to the cardinal vice of Peter the Great’s reforms—their tendency to denationalise. The world saw in him a despot of the most unmitigated type. When the storm of hatred in which he went down to his grave hadpassed away, his bitterest foes were fain to admit that he had given to all the peoples of his empire the germs of a sense of brotherhood, a robust faith in Russia, which is the surest guarantee of a splendid and prosperous future. Nor were his subjects slow to recall his many admirable qualities. He was steadfast and true, devoted to the Fatherland, inexorable to himself even more than to others. He despised feudalism and privileges—those quicksands which engulphed the French monarchy and threaten the existence of others as venerable. When Metternich took exception to the grant of the highest Russian order to Field-Marshal Radetzki, on the score of the veteran’s humble origin, Nicholas replied that he valued a man, not for his ancestors but solely for his deserts. In the private relations of life—as a husband, father and friend, he shone with the serenest light, and conferred undying obligations on the empire. Before his reign men spoke of an imperial dynasty; they now allude to the house of Romanov as a “family”; and the domestic joys in which succeeding czars have sought relief from the cares of state find a counterpart in millions of Russian homes.k
[68][The Uniate is a part of the Greek church which has submitted to the supremacy of the pope.]
[68][The Uniate is a part of the Greek church which has submitted to the supremacy of the pope.]