The Washington herald., 1915-04-25
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I his own temperamental unfitness for ruiz
and Nicholas. younger brother became
Gzar IN 1 ne new Gzar and Snrs INNS ms
self much like the potentates of old
With stern candor he bade his subjects
to look only to God for mercy, as he re,
desolated Poland until the announcement
that peace reigns in Warsaw took It's
place among the cynicisms of history.
to the East rather than to the West.
For military purposes he commanded
!! ruler he laid on the map when in
structing the American engineer-but
he declined to lay a rail in the direc-
hand, he raised his flag at Kamchatka
on the Pacific and brought the Amur
River under his control.
STA in the crimean war. :he Car
threatened them with the vengeance
of his most trusted defenders from in
airy. Amid the rigors of the latter
month, in the year 1855, he himself
was MORALLY stricken, and Punch car.
tooned the event as the treason OF
Gen. February"
The Pendulum.
As Nicholas had reacted from Alex
ander !, his son and successor reacted
from him, and the rule Of Alexander III
mas pdSSco lutO ulSkoiy ZIG hiosS
benevolent Of Russian reigns. While
the American republic was freeing the
slaves with the bayonet, this Gar,
with stroke of his pen, emancipated
many times as many serfs in 1883.
And all those millions of bondmen
were liberated without a cent of COM
pensation for their lawful owners.
Nevertheless. Alexander's Quarter OF
with the terrors of the Nihilists and
the reprisals of the police. For years
he remained the target of the reds.
last in 1881. A great church has
risen at the scene Of the assassination
and, having been built out, into the
T fhfss the she czsr ie G and died sf may
be seen there under canopy of price,
Hate begets hate. Alexander III
mounted the throne with a grim purpose
to avenge his father and exterminate all
forms of agitation and radicalisnL
The scaffold and Siberia became famii-
lar weapons in his hands. while in his
passion against nihilism he struck down
whatever liberty the press had enjoyed.
curbed the university and cracked the
receive thought. At the same time. no
sifcation In Poland and Lithuania and.
R a5xns Capped them IN the Polish Pae
1t Is peculiarly fitting that a reign
which relapsed into the Oriental despot-
ism Of the earlier CZarE should nave
left its best monument In Asia The
earliest sovereign to be crowned on the
hill of the Kremlin could have crossed
his little domain on horseback in q day.
Generation by generation the dominion
widened until none Of Its later rulers
had traversed its immense breadth.
Alexander III decreed in4sS1 that the
vast realm should be bound in hoops Of
steel 5000 miles in length, and in that
year the Czarevitch. now Nicholas II.
formally inaugurated the construction of
the Trans-Siberian Railway. when he
turned the first sod close by the Golden
Horn at Vladivostock. Nicholas succeed
ed to the crown at the death of his faith
er 1894. and Is the first Of the imperial
line to have stood on the Russian shore
Of the Pacific and seen the sun start
on his daily journey Of eight hours across
the empire of the Cars.
A Double Personality.
I said in the beginning that II tho his
tory of Russia il tho history of the
Cars, the best place to read the story
Is in the Kremlin. For the Cars are
like their twin palaces. which symbolic
the strangely dual nature Of the Russian
empire and It's autocrats. There ono
passes in a moment from great halls with
glistening marble and cleaning gold
wherein thousands and thousands Of
electric lights glow. into dusky. low
vaulted Oriental apartments. There II
In but . step from the fifteenth to tho
twentieth century from the dim dawn
Of Muscovy to q Russia ablaze on the