Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/85

Rh the American war involving the possible recognition of the Southern Confederacy. When, soon afterwards, the French and English ministers appeared at the State Department together his information prepared him to meet them. Knowing their object, Mr Seward politely avoided receiving them jointly and adroitly turned one off with a dinner invitation while he saw the other alone. But the joint movement of the two governments went on. Joint action on neutrality pointed the way to joint action on intervention. Who could measure the dangers of such a portentous step? Would Mr Lincoln's government, already absorbed in a life-and-death grapple with a giant rebellion, also accept the gage of war with the united strength of the two great nations of western Europe? Could it hope to prevail against these combined perils, or would the unequal struggle leave the Union irretrievably divided and broken ?

That was the startling menace. Russia's feeling was known, and before the blow was struck it was important to know what Russia would do. Louis Napoleon took steps to ascertain — I have reason to believe through an autograph letter to the Czar, Alexander II, advising him that the French and English governments believed the time had come when they ought to mediate or intervene between the North and South, and inviting him to join in the movement. The Czar declined to do so unless Mr Lincoln's government should request it. But the menace continued, and thereupon the Russian fleet steamed into the bay of New York and cast anchor within sight of Trinity spire. All the world knew what that act meant; Louis Napoleon knew, and the threatened intervention never came.

This chapter of past judgments does not justify any misjudgments now, but it does impose the obligation of seeking to pronounce present judgments in a fair and just spirit. Russia is engaged at this hour in a foreign war which has thus far been full of surprises and disasters, and she is at the same time in the throes of a domestic agitation which, let us hope, will lead to a great advance for the Empire. No treatment of the general subject can ignore these phases, and they will be the better understood if we look at them against the background of the national structure and organization and character.

Russia is a country of extraordinary contrasts ; of imperial splendor and of widespread poverty,; of the magnificence of the court and of the squalor of the moujik ; of the stately grandeur of St Petersburg or the picturesque orientalism of Moscow, and of the dreary, dead level of dull and endless plains ; of the highest culture and the broadest ignorance ; of the boundless treasures of the unequaled Winter Palace, with its 500 opulent rooms, or of imposing St Isaac's, with its malachite columns and its golden dome, and of the boundless destitution of almost uncounted millions ; of the literary genius of Poushkin and Gogol, of Tourgenieff and Tolstoi, and of the dense illiteracy of the masses ; of the pictorial wonders of Verestchagin and of the most primitive agricultural and industrial arts — in a word, of the highest development of grace and culture in social life and of the deepest penury and hardship on the broad national field.

And as it is a country of extremes in condition so it has been portrayed in extremes of opinion. On the one hand it has been painted in the blackest of colors. It has been pictured as a land of Tartar barbarism and of Muscovite tyranny, where the Siberian exile is the expression of all cruelty and the Jewish proscription as the embodiment of all intolerance and persecution. Its government has been described as a despotism tempered by assassination. On the other hand it has been delineated in some quarters as a benign and