The great Empress spurred hope by another movement.  She proposed to an academy the question of serf-emancipation as a subject for their prize-essay.  The essay was written and crowned.  It was filled with beautiful things about liberty, practical things about moderation, flattering things about “the Great Catharine,”—­and the serfs waited.

Again she aroused hope.  It was given out that her most intense delight came from the sight of happy serfs and prosperous villages.  Accordingly, in her journey to the Crimea, Potemkin squandered millions on millions in rearing pasteboard villages,—­in dragging forth thousands of wretched peasants to fill them,—­in costuming them to look thrifty,—­in training them to look happy.  Catharine was rejoiced,—­Europe sang paeans,—­the serfs waited.[F]

[Footnote F:  For further growth of the sentimental fashion thus set, see Memoirs of the Princess Daschkaw, Vol.  I. p. 383.]

She seemed to go farther:  she issued a decree prohibiting the enslavement of serfs.  But, unfortunately, the palace-intrigues, and the correspondence with the philosophers, and the destruction of Polish nationality left her no time to see the edict carried out.  But Europe applauded,—­and the serfs waited.

Two years after this came a deed which put an end to all this uncertainty.  An edict was prepared, ordering the peasants of Little Russia to remain forever on the estates where the day of publication should find them.  This was vile; but what followed was diabolic.  Court-pets were let into the secret.  These, by good promises, enticed hosts of peasants to their estates.  The edict was now sprung;—­in an hour the courtiers were made rich, the peasants were made serfs, and Catharine II. was made infamous forever.

So, about a century after Peter, there rolled over Russia a wave of wrong which not only drowned honor in the nobility, but drowned hope in the people.

As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must have sunk within them.  For Paul I., Catharine’s son and successor, was infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained by public opinion.  He had been born with savage instincts, and educated into ferocity.  Tyranny was written on his features, in his childhood.  If he remained in Russia, his mother sneered and showed hatred to him; if he journeyed in Western Europe, crowds gathered about his coach to jeer at his ugliness.  Most of those who have seen Gillray’s caricature of him, issued in the height of English spite at Paul’s homage to Bonaparte, have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen the portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps at St. Petersburg know well that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul’s ugliness, for he could not.

And Paul’s face was but a mirror of his character.  Tyranny was wrought into his every fibre.  He insisted on an Oriental homage.  As his carriage whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop, descend into the mud, and bow themselves.  Himself threw his despotism into this formula,—­“Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is no one noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I speak.”