The Ouachita telegraph. [volume] (Monroe, La.) 1865-1889, 1881-03-25
THE ASSASSINATION OF THE czAR.
New York Sun.1

power and to the implacable enemies
whom the harshness, or the weakness,
of his later years had raised against
him.
The assassins saw in him only the
man corrupted and deformed by the
fatal opportunities of the autocrat, the
man held responsible for the sanguin-
airy coercion sof Poland, for the immo-
iation of thousands of his subjects in
Siberian mines or on the scaffold, the
man whose iron will or panic stricken
adamant between the mass of educated
Russians and their just aspirations for
elfgovernment.
But he is dead, and the evil which
he did, affecting mainly individuals,
may not long survive him, whereas
the good this man performed, by re-
deeming from an age-long slavery the
bulk of the Russian nation, will long
live after him. Long after the constit-
utional rights which he refused to re-
cognize have been granted to Russia,
the world will know the son and sue
cessor of Nicholas as the Emancipator,
and the millions OF enfranchised serfs
will give him, as through all the tur-
m oil and terror of recent years they
still gave HINT the title of Little Father.
1t is idle to seek to beIittle the most
stupendous act of beneficence ever
wrought by an autOcralic hand. 1t is
vain to speak of the manumission of
thirty millions as an act of policy, as
intended to diminish the importance of
the mobiles, and reduce the whole popu-
lation to dead level of subservience
and impotence. Those who would ac-
cept this unreasonable and ungratefuI
view must be strangely ignorant ofthe
personal sacrifices which the measure
upon the sovereign, and of
the tremendous pressure brought to
bear upon his mind by all the potent
and subtle levers known to Il court.
They overlook the momentous fact
that the serfs upon the crown lands,
large fraction of the
whole number, We're not only freed
outright, but gratuitousiy endowed
with the lands necessary for their
support, While the funds advanced by
the State to enable the quondam serfs
of mobiles to purchase land would have
been deemed under other reigns so
much deducted from the Cars in
come. Indeed, the original object con-
in attaching the peasants to
the soil was not to enrich the mobiles,
but tC secure the revenues of the
crown. But the question should need
no argument. The great fact stands
forth, that alone of the House Of
Alexander II. found it in
his heart to say that the curse of slavery
should be wiped away from Russia.
Shall we pity or shall we envy the
man who had it in his power to save
from untold misery and unpictured de-
graduation thirty millions Of his fellow
beings, and who recognized and seized
the splendid opportunity? Never be-
fore in the history of the earth has it
been given to any individual to shape
for good, by a simple act of his per
sonal volition, the lives Of such a
large section of humanity. Never has
any sovereign been able to point, in
the account with his subjects, to such
vast arrears of incompatible benefac-
tions. When history sums up the ver-
dict on the unhappy man who perish
ed yesterday there will be more of
poignant sympathy and sorrow in her
accents than of wrath and Indignation,
II 1t be true that foreign countries fore
cast the verdict of posterity, it is not
lmprobnDie that the feeling of kind
ness which Americans have had cause
to cherish for the murdered Gar will
be the dominant sentiment of after
times.
The effect of this deplorable event on
the internal administration and the
foreign policy of Russia cannot fail to
be profound, though it may diverge
widely from the expectation Of those
whose persistent attempts upon the
life of the late Gar have at last proved
successful. 1t is we'll known that
Alexander was by nature the gentlest
Romanoff who has ever been suffered
to wear the crown, and that the harsh,
temper Of the Czarwitch
recalls much more vividly his grand
father than his immediate parent. 1t
would not be surprising if the Mill.
lists and those who make it their bust
ness TO temper despotism by assassina-
ton should find the next monarch's
little finger thicker than his fathers
lions. We need not add that the tie
which bound the courts of Berlin and
Petersburg is virtually sundered by this
death, and that tho accession of a Car
avowedly inimical to Germans and
friendly to the French is an event of
far-reaching political importance. For
the moment, however, generous and
candid men, in Russia and outside of
it, while acknowledging this mans
shortcomings, Will compare the sur
passing brightness and grandeur of his
beginning with his melancholy end