Page:The Czar, A Tale of the Time of the First Napleon.djvu/65

Rh "Ah, child, I forgot. So little do you know as yet of wrong and cruelty, that the story of the efforts to redress them falls without meaning on your ear. But the young do well to remember much they cannot understand. As for me, I was born a serf, like my father and my father's father; and these lips of mine shall be silent in the grave ere they forget to praise Alexander Paulovitch. Before his time we were bought and sold like the beasts of the field. You might read a notice in the window of a shop, 'To be sold:—An active and capable servant, and a good milch cow. Inquire within.' This he forbade; forbidding also the removal of peasants from the land. He permits and encourages the nobles to set their serfs at liberty whenever they will; and if they are without land, he himself advances them money to purchase their homesteads. He has deprived their lords of the dangerous privilege of sending them to Siberia without a trial; nor dare any one, however rich or great, use his serfs with harshness or cruelty. Amongst many stories of his interference on behalf of the oppressed, I remember one concerning a great lady, whose name I will not tell you, as she lives in this city. From that love of money which the priests tell us is a root of all evil, she neglected her sick and aged serfs, and allowed them to suffer from want. The Czar heard of it, and he sent his own physician to minister to these poor suffering peasants, whom no man cared for. Dr. Wylie—so they call him—a shrewd, clever Scotchman, took care to order his patients so many expensive remedies and comforts that the princess, by the time she had paid for wine and wheaten flour, and I know not what besides, had also learned the useful lesson that nothing costs so dear in the long run as a duty neglected. Nor has the Czar given the mujik that which costs him nothing. He refuses absolutely to grant men as serfs to his courtiers; and thus he has dried up the unfailing stream of wealth wherewith all the Czars that went before him have enriched and rewarded their servants without impoverishing