We have shown this vague fear in Nicholas’s mind thus at length and in different workings, because thereby alone can be grasped the master-key to his dealings with the serf system.  Toward his toiling millions Nicholas always showed sympathy.  Let news of a single wrong to a serf get through the hedges about the Russian majesty, and woe to the guilty master!  Many of these wrongs came to Nicholas’s notice; and he came to hate the system, and tried to undermine it.  Opposition met him, of course; not so much the ponderous laziness of Peter’s time as an opposition, polite and elastic, which never ranted and never stood up—­for then Nicholas would have throttled it and stamped upon it.  But it did its best to entangle his reason and thwart his action.  He was told that the serfs were well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed, well-provided with religion; were contented, and had no wish to leave their owners.

Now Nicholas was not strong at spinning sham reasons nor subtle at weaving false conscience; but, to his mind, the very fact that the system had so degraded a man that he could laugh and dance and sing, while other men took his wages, his wife, and homestead, was the crowning argument against the system.  Then the political economists beset him, proving that without forced labor Russia must sink into sloth and poverty.

Yet all this could not shut out from Nicholas’s sight the great black fact in the case.  He saw, and winced as he saw, that, while other European nations, even under despots, were comparatively active and energetic, his own people were sluggish and stagnant; that, although great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or builders, or inventors, but only two main products of Russian civilization, dissolute lords and abject serfs.

Nearly twenty years went by in this timid dropping of grains of salt into a putrid sea.  But at last, in 1842, Nicholas issued his ukase creating the class of “contracting peasants.”  Masters and serfs were empowered to enter into contracts, the serf receiving freedom, the master receiving payment in instalments.  It was a moderate innovation, very moderate—­nothing more than the first failure of the First Alexander.  Yet even here that old timidity of Nicholas nearly spoiled what little good was hidden in the ukase.  Notice after notice was given to the serf-owners that they were not to be molested, that no emancipation was contemplated, and that the ukase contained “nothing new.”  The result was as feeble as the policy.  A few serfs were emancipated, and Nicholas halted.  The revolutions of 1848 increased his fear of innovation; and finally the war in the Crimea took from him the power of innovation.

The great man died.  We saw his cold dead face, in the midst of crowns and crosses, very pale then, very powerless then.  One might stare at him, then, as at a serf’s corpse; for he who had scared Europe during thirty years lay before us that day as a poor lump of chilled brain and withered muscle.  And we stood by, when, amid chanting and flare of torches and roll of cannon, his sons wrapped him in his shroud of gold thread, and lowered him into the tomb of his fathers.