Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/565

 . 10, 1860.] 

walk the streets without a passport; where am I to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“May I go and throw myself into the sea, off yonder pier, without a passport?”

“Oh, yes; you may do that.”

That is about the only thing one can do without a passport in Russia. The result of it all was, that I surrendered myself to the worthy Minister of Justice (or injustice), and was actually conveyed to St. Petersburg under the care of that very pair of eyes which had looked so suspicious on board the steamer. I afterwards discovered that those prying eyes had never lost sight of me throughout the day; they had dogged me from fort to fort, from inn to inn, from street to street, and were never taken off from their guard over my innocent head till they had seen me safe and sound in St. Petersburg. Many thanks for their loving watchfulness and care.

When I look back on these adventures with a passport in Russia, I cannot but feel how they served, after all the annoyance, to enhance the blessings and value of a free country. The passport system in Russia is a relic of Oriental barbarism; a badge of slavery; a sign that the Russians can call neither body nor soul their own, but must have them ticketed and labelled with their owner’s name. “Alexander II., Autocrat of all the Russias, passport No. 5471.” It was all very well for our ancestor Gurth the swineherd and the slave to endure; but free-born men, living in a free country, will never bend their necks to wear a collar. The passport is another sort of ticket-of-leave, and the system is one equally associated with villany and corruption and much public inconvenience. To submit to the ignominy of carrying a label about you, certifying who you are, as if you word were not enough; to be obliged to show this ticket to every little pettifogging functionary, who may choose to demand it; to be liable to a cross-examination by said functionary on every little minutia every time he happens to have a grudge against you, or fancies that you have not bribed him liberally enough; this is a degradation to which none but a convicted criminal ought to be subjected. I have been in almost every country in Europe, but I have seen no country where the brand is burnt in so deeply as in Russia. When I last returned home from the North; when I trod once more upon the free English soil, and breathed once more the free English air, I felt a weight taken off my soul; I experienced a sense of returning strength and manhood; and I thanked God that my home is in glorious Old England!