The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1881-04-09

IL I'LL VI WIN lew ~
been plotting to take the life of the Emperor
Nicholas had sustained so many defeats
that the news of their final success comes
as a painful surprise. The cause of Liberty
is never advanced by such crimes-still less
so when they are committed in he sensa-
tional and atrociOus manner which charac-
terized the assassination of the Gar. 1t is
because so many vile acts of this sort are
committed in her ~name-because so many
evil-minded men make it the cloak for the
qualification of their own malice and spleen
/ that the sacred cause of Liberty makes
such slow progress in an age whose actual
enlightenment ought to guarantee for it a
speedy victory. The remark that the as
sassins had 6 killed the Emperor and killed
Nihilism with him" may prove to have
been an eXaggeration, but it is justified by
the strong,feelings of eXecration which their
deed excited throughout Russia, among all
ranks ofthe people, when its horrible details
and the death of the Emperor became
known.
Alexander ii bore a name of good omen.
When the Muscovites were pressed upon all
sides by other races, Alexander the Saint, by
his military genius, preserved their indie
pendence and by the fatherly character of
his rule and his personal qualities acquired
the title by which he is known to posterity.
The late Emperor's reign has been distin-
guished by many victories of the Russian
arms, but he will be chiefly remembered as
the emancipation of %, 900, 900 serfs, and the
creator OF the first representative bodies
ever known in Russia-the Provincial As
semblies. The vigorous reforms which
characterized the early part of his reign
were however either carried too far or
not far enough, and the Car long ago came
TO be looked upon as the perSOnification of
abSolutlsm in its most retrOgressiVe form.
The faults of his disposition as displayed in
early youth, when the discipline of a mill
tary college provoked him to insubordina-
ton, and the society of court ladies found
favor in his eyes rather than the camp
where his duties lay, seem to have re-estab-
llshed their ascendency over him as the
vigor of manhood declined, and the later
annals of his reign are more notable for the
attempts upon his life than for any other
events, except the successful but not very
glorious war with Turkey. 1t is nearly
fourteen years since, during his memorable
VIZ HAS pO W dSSdSSlLdIc
him was made, and he cannot be said to
have lived in security at any time since.
How far his personal acts and decisions, and
the enmities they evoked, nave gone
towards preparing for him the harassing
fate of late years, with its frightfuI ultimate
catastrophe, it is impossible to say. 1t is,
however, very difficult to believe that even
the widest Missionaries could see any possi-
BILE advancement of the cause of Liberty in
the cowardly murder of a man whose son
must needs step into his throne with a
mind exasperated against liberalism by the
brutal fate dealt out to his father.
The new Emperor is in the prime of life,
having passed his ~thirty-sixth birthday
on the Thursday before his fathers death.
Ot his tendencies and political ideas, little
seems to be certainly known. If they
differed from his fathers, prudence, and
hlial reverence which exists so much
more strongly in the Russ than in men
who dwell further to the West, would no
doubt dictate abstinence from any open
expression of them. His close alliance
by marriage with the King of Greece NAV
render the partizanship of Russia for the
Greeks, in their disputes with Turkey, more
Jealous than heretofore. But he is not a
military man either by training or by
temperament, and unless the reaction
occasioned by the fate of the late Gar
deters him, he is more likely to give his
subjects a constitution thar a series of
foreign wars.