day a broader view than that of the eighteenth century is permissible and a Russian official may now hearken to the dictates of patriotism, even when they clash with the promptings of loyalty to his Tsar. If we have not yet wholly forgotten our national saying: "whose bread I eat, his song I sing," we are at least beginning to render unto Russia the things that are Russia's without refusing to the Tsar the things that are the Tsar's.

My sketch of Nicholas II. has been yery favorably received throughout the world as harmonizing in essentials with the Emperor's public words and acts. But it has been found fault with too as all attempts to fix for ever what is ever in flux will and should be. "The very truth," says our poet, Tiutcheff, "when clad in words becomes a lie." How much more an attempt to outline a character, whose essential traits so far elude analysis that even to close observers it seems little more than a negation. The very courtiers who claim to know the Emperor best are unable though willing to credit him with any of those positive qualities which psychologists designate as the groundwork of virile character. Indeed in their sincere moods they speak of him as susceptible less to clear-cut motives than to vague influence and ascribe his acts to emdtional impulse rather than to reflective will.

Another difficulty was created by the limitations of my task. I had to do with the visionary autocrat only, prescinding almost entirely from the man. Otherwise, I should have gladly brought out in relief certain engaging features of the individual, Nicolai Alexandrovitch Romanoff, which form a pleasing set-off to the forbidding aspect of the Tsar Nicholas II. Thus, I would have emphasized the fact that he is an uncommonly dutiful son, who interprets

filial respect more generously than the followers of Confucius, having frequently submitted not his will only but also his judgment to that of his august mother. A model húsband, he leaves little undone to ensure the happiness of his imperial consort. A tender father, he literally adores his children with an almost maternal fervor, and often magnanimously deprives himself of the keen pleasure which the discharge of the clerical duties of kingship confers in order to watch over his darling little Grand Duke and Grand Duchesses and to see that sunshine brightens those lives dear to millions. What, for instance, could be more touching or sympathetic than the picture—which courtiers draw for us-of the dread autocrat of all the Russias anxiously superintending the details of the bathing of his little son, the Grand Duke Alexis, at the height of the diplomatic storm raised by the North Sea incident? What could be more idyllic than the pretty human weakness betokened by the joyful exclamation with which the great potentate suddenly interrupted Rojdestvensky who was making a report on the Baltic Squadron: "But are you aware he weighs 14 lbs. ?" "Who, your Majesty?" asked the Admiral, his mind still entangled in questions of displacement, quick-firing guns, and other kindred matters. "The Heir to the throne," answered the happy father. Touches of nature like this offer a refreshing contrast to the Byzantine stiffness of the autocrat bending over his table and writing marginal glosses.

A most obliging disposition also marks his intercourse with foreign dynasties, and perhaps warrants the sharpness with which some of their members censured my uncourtly frankness. For Tsar Nicholas has often gone out of his way to do them a good turn, and never willingly refuses their requests for concessions

industrial, commercial, and political. Indeed, he has been known to grant them when compliance involved tremendous sacrifices on the part of his much-enduring subjects. In proof of this amiable trait, were it called in question, I could give the names and summarize the letters of princes, princesses, and monarchs who have repeatedly tested the good nature of their worthy cousin, by craving for industrial concessions, shipping subsidies, and lucrative trading privileges-to say nothing of territorial grants-to bestow which even a Russian autocrat sometimes needs a strong tincture of what courtiers would term moral courage.

To these amiable traits I was precluded from doing justice. I could hardly even touch upon the broad indulgence shown by Nicholas II. to the shortcomings of his Russian kith and kin, which in degree oftentimes borders upon participation. It was thus that, after he had forbidden the Grand Ducal band to begrime themselves in the mire of Corean concessions, he first withdrew the prohibition and then himself became a shareholder in the venture, risking his millions and what ought to have been of greater value than money's worth-his fair name. For no one who knows the Emperor will for a moment ascribe this faux pas to any such sordid motives as those avowed by his uncles and cousins. It was the kindly act of a man who feels that blood is thicker than water, and wishes to express the sentiment in deeds. Unfortunately history, which deals summarily with men and motives, will be scarcely less shocked at finding Nicholas II. among the profit-hunters of the Far East than

One, I am told, is widely (and favorably known as the amateur photographer of the money-bags of our Treasury, and another has acquired so thorough a knowledge of the unseen world and such intimacy with its most

at the sight of Voltaire illegally jobbing with a Jew in Saxon securities.

To be severely frowned down by certain of those august personages, whose fondness for our Tsar is thus solidly grounded, I was quite prepared. Noblesse oblige. Neither was I surprised by the strictures of the few Englishspeaking critics who thrust aside the sketch I drew as a mere fancy picture, because they failed to recognize in it the statesmanlike traits of the great and good monarch who in his inscrutable wisdom had once admitted them to his presence for twenty and thirty minutes respectively. But I was astonished that one fault should have been found with my drawing, which even a hasty comparison with the original would have disproved. I had charged the Tsar, it was said, with sins of commission, while his self-appointed advocates plead guilty in his name at most to sins of omission. His Majesty, they urged, may be gifted with a will which like pure gold, is most malleable; he may wear his heart too often on his sleeve, and political daws may peck at it, but to describe him as defying his Ministers and overriding the majority of his Imperial Council, is to lampoon, not to portray him. It runs counter to his character. For Providence, out of love for its chosen people of to-day, endowed him with "the temperament of an Imperial Hamlet." Here facts alone, I submit, should turn the scale, and facts in support of my thesis are plentiful and decisive.

One of the most striking is the isolation of the autocrat who stands on his lofty pedestal like Simon Stylites on his pillar or the ex-Dalai Lama in his monastery. There is not one minister now in the Emperor's Council Chamber

truthful denizens that he was once spoken of in Russiajas a possible successor to M. Philippe as Medium-in-waiting to the Tsar. "Sed dis aliter visum est."

sufficiently magnetic in manner or dazzling in mind to fascinate the will or sway the intellect of his imperial master. Not one. Formerly there were not wanting such conspicuous officials in the immediate environment of the autocrat, men who might have been thought capable of throwing an irresistible spell over him. One of these was K. P. Pobedonostseff, who for a time was taken for the substance behind the Imperial shadow. Another was M. Witte, misnamed the Russian Richelieu, and fabled to have his own way in all things political and financial. Later still it was V. K. von Plehve, who was known to be the wire-puller of the bureaucracy and was suspected of being also the inspirer of the Tsar. And thus for several years a succession of pre-eminent men gave color to the widespread view that Nicholas II. was a passive tool in the hands of others. For that reason the elements of the revolutionary opposition held his ministers and certain unofficial counsellors answerable for the lamentable plight of the people. Nicholas II. was for them a misguided but well-intentioned youth, who if advised by honest, patriotic and enlightened men might make a beneficent or, at any rate, a harmless ruler. To him, therefore, their resentment never extended. the long list of murders which constitute their panacea for all our political ills, they never once raised their bloodstained hands against the person of the monarch. Balmashoff, the assassin of the Minister Sipyaghin, said to the judges who condemned him to death: "For the present we harbor no designs against the Emperor." Minister, governors, and members of the police were shot, stabbed, or blown to pieces in turn. But the Tsar was raised to a higher plane-a plane of safety-beyond the arena of strife. His elevation to that fastness was the result of the impression prevailing about his charac

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ter, his aims, and the part he was playing in the State. And I wrote my first article to keep him on that plane.

The bomb which blew up V. K. von Plehve exploded that idea, and pulled down with it the pillars of the sanctuary in which at critical periods the Emperor might take refuge. And at present one cannot contemplate without a tinge of pain the sight of the slender figure of the self-complacent autocrat standing over against the elemental force of a seething mass of men, of whom all seem discontented, and many are menacing. It affects one like the sight of a stone-deaf man sauntering cheerfully along a railway line while the express is rushing up behind him and the onlooker can warn neither the pedestrian nor the engine-driver. Since Plehve's death the word has gone forth that Nicholas is Tsar, the Grand Dukes are his Viziers, and the ministers are but the menials of both. And congruously with that dogma Russia's destiny will be henceforth worked out. Thus Prince Sviatopolk Mirsky is but the executor of the Emperor's commands, honestly eager to help, yet truly willing to retire, a clean-handed official imbued with what is best in Russian culture and in modern tendencies, but without claim or ambition to pass as a statesman or a theorist. Loyalty to the Emperor and good-will to the nation prompted him to lend his name to the autocracy and devote his efforts to the welfare of the people. Thus, like the nettle of the fable, which borrowed the scent of the rose, the Government received for a time the perfume of the Prince's name. But actual contact soon revealed the sting.

Clearly, then, it is not Prince Sviatopolk Mirsky who can be accused of bearing the odious part of tempter.

M. Pobedonostseff long stood forth in that unenviable capacity, and was once "condemned to death" in consequence by the cold-blooded criminals who

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grimly speak of their bullets and their bombs as the only effective checks upon the crimes of the administration. fate turned the assassin's bullet from the Ober-Procuror of the Most Holy Synod to Sipyaghin the Minister of the Interior. Since then, however, the lay pope of our Orthodox Church has lived chiefly in the past. He still has friendly intercourse with his emotional sovereign, but their conversation hardly ever turns on topics of actual political interest, and of the influence which he once wielded over the autocracy under Alexander III. every trace has vanished. M. Pobedonostseff, then, has done his work, and it remains only for history to label it. As prompter of the Tsar he has had no successor. For M. Witte's intellect was always redoubted, his will-power feared, and his insolence resented by the shy, faint-hearted monarch, who sometimes puts the plain speaking of the Russian "Richelieu" in the same category as blasphemy and atheism. But thanks to the Dowager Empress his services are not wholly disdained; he was chosen to impersonate our Government in passing through the Caudine yoke of the RussoGerman Commercial Treaty; he had his agrarian reforms lately sanctioned by the Emperor, and he is now charged with carrying out the schemes mooted by Nicholas II. in the historic ukase. But M. Witte had to stoop to conquer; it is he who surrendered to the Tsar, not the Tsar to him. They are now temporary allies, friends they can never be. After having drafted the paragraph creating a legislative assembly as an indispensable condition of reform, M. Witte assented to its being struck out with a resigned exclamation: Fiat voluntas tua.

Nicholas II., therefore, is his own master, and is himself answerable for his men and measures, such being his Imperial will and pleasure. If some of the men are unclean monsters

Grand Ducal harpies-who rob the people of their substance, and "break the records" of vice and crime without drawing down punishment or provoking censure, he who tolerates, shields, and befriends them shares the odium of their misdeeds and participates in their risks. If the Tsar robs Finland of her liberties, despoils Armenian schools and churches, suppresses the nationality of the Poles, and keeps the Russians more miserable than any foreign element of our population, we may discuss his motives, but we cannot question his responsibility. same time, it is a fact which should be noted as an extenuating circumstance that in everything he does and leaves undone he is strongly, but, as a rule, indirectly, influenced by his uncles, cousins, and nephews, the Imperial drones, who are ever buzzing about him. They seem endowed with

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a special faculty of calling forth what is least estimable in the Emperor's character. They surround him with a moral atmosphere charged with mephitic and stupefying vapors, which bring on a morbid mood, and then the slightest touch from without provokes the acts which cause our people to wince and writhe.

Only of late has it become known that Nicholas II. at the head of his Grand Ducal satellites has long been his own adviser and his own Government, and from that moment the lines of his portrait gained in sharpness. For he now stands forth as the author of the present sanguinary war, the marplot of the military staff, and the main obstacle to the peace to which he has so often publicly done lip-worship. In that mock heroic rôle of l'Etat c'est moi, Nicholas II. is also recognized as the one hindrance to popular reforms at home, which in a greater or lesser measure most intelligent Russians deem indispensable to the welfare of the nation. And the dangers inseparable

from damming with his own person a streamlet which the blood of Manchurian battlefields may yet swell to the dimensions of a resistless torrent, have so far ceased to be vague that they were charitably and discreetly pointed out several weeks ago to a member of the Imperial family by a crowned and kindhearted foreign monarch. For some time after this it seemed as if the warning had been taken to heart, and the danger would be averted by timely concessions to reasonable demands. But subsequent events have whittled away the grounds for those humane hopes. The screw which was loosened for a season has again been tightened; law remains supplanted by caprice; and the well-being of the nation which might have been furthered by a prudent Imperial fiat is blocked by a ukase which embitters everybody. For almost all Russia now discerns the alternative, and accepts the struggle, the Emperor and his family being among the few who lack a keen sense of the grim reality. Heartfelt sadness is the feeling aroused in the onlooker by this tragic spectacle; unalloyed sadness with no admixture of surprise.

For Nicholas II. appears to have been cause-blind from the very beginning. The law of causalty entering his mind is seemingly always refracted like a sunbeam striking the surface of the water. It changes its direction. It was in consequence of that defect that while moving every lever to produce war, he was purblind to the approach of the conflict and deaf to the warnings of those who could see. The dispute with Japan was originally caused by the personal policy of the Emperor who seized his neighbor's property and believed he could placate the despoiled people by crying: "No offence intended!" Well-meaning at bottom, but logic-proof and mystical, he instinctively followed the example of the vam

pire which fans its victims while sucking their life blood. Under his predecessors Russia had grown and "thriven" in this way, and why should she not continue to grow in like manner under him? So overweening was his confidence in his own prophetic vision that he was impervious to the arguments of the wisest of his responsible advisers and risked the welfare of his subjects on the slender chance of his being a Moses to his people. And he resisted his ministers, not with the harmless swagger of a vainglorious youth but with the calm settled presumption which medical psychologists describe as incurable. Like those Chinese Boxers, who believing their lives were charmed, smilingly stood up to the bullets of the Europeans, so Nicholas II. cheerfully exposed not himself nor his Imperial house but his people to a disaster which his second sight assured him could never come. For he started with a mistaken view of autocracy. He held, and holds, that ac cording to God's will the unique absolute ruler of modern times should be at once the arbiter of peace and war throughout the globe, and the keeper of the lives, the property, and the souls of his people at home. And he acted up to that belief. Thus he took it for granted that as no foreign Power would dare to attack Russia, peace depended on whether he would attack any foreign Power. And as he was resolved not to declare war, he reasoned that peace was therefore secure during his lifetime. One difference between him and the Boxer is, that the Boxer risked only his own life, whereas Nicholas II. risked and lost those of tens of thousands of his people. And even an autocrat were he never so wise ought not to be invested with such tremendous power.

Clearly, then, the trouble with Japan was brewed by the Tsar, acting not on the advice but against the recommenda