The great article of Nicholas’s creed was a complete, downright faith in Despotism, and in himself as Despotism’s apostle.

Hence he hated, above all things, a limited monarchy.  He told De Custine that a pure monarchy or pure republic he could understand; but that anything between these he could not understand.  Of his former rule of Poland, as constitutional monarch, he spoke with loathing.

Of this hate which Nicholas felt for liberal forms of government there yet remain monuments in the great museum of the Kremlin.

That museum holds an immense number of interesting things, and masses of jewels and plate which make all other European collections mean.  The visitor wanders among clumps of diamonds, and sacks of pearls, and a nauseating wealth of rubies and sapphires and emeralds.  There rise row after row of jewelled scymitars, and vases and salvers of gold, and old saddles studded with diamonds, and with stirrups of gold,—­presents of frightened Asiatic satraps or fawning European allies.

There, too, are the crowns of Muscovy, of Russia, of Kazan, of Astrachan, of Siberia, of the Crimea, and, pity to say it, of Poland.  And next this is an index of despotic hate,—­for the Polish sceptre is broken and flung aside.

Near this stands the full-length portrait of the first Alexander; and at his feet are grouped captured flags of Hungary and Poland,—­some with blood-marks still upon them.

But below all,—­far beneath the feet of the Emperor,—­in dust and ignominy and on the floor, is flung the very Constitution of Poland—­parchment for parchment, ink for ink, good promise for good promise—­which Alexander gave with so many smiles, and which Nicholas took away with so much bloodshed.

And not far from this monument of the deathless hate Nicholas bore that liberty he had stung to death stands a monument of his admiration for straightforward tyranny, even in the most dreaded enemy his house ever knew.  Standing there is a statue in the purest of marble,—­the only statue in those vast halls.  It has the place of honor.  It looks proudly over all that glory, and keeps ward over all that treasure; and that statue, in full majesty of imperial robes and bees and diadem and face, is of the first Napoleon.  Admiration of his tyrannic will has at last made him peaceful sovereign of the Kremlin.

This spirit of absolutism took its most offensive form in Nicholas’s attitude toward Europe.  He was the very incarnation of reaction against revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who infest Central Europe.

Whenever, then, any tyrant’s lie was to be baptized, he stood its godfather; whenever any God’s truth was to be crucified, he led on those who passed by reviling and wagging their heads.  Whenever these oppressors revived some old feudal wrong, Nicholas backed them in the name of Religion; whenever their nations struggled to preserve some great right, Nicholas crushed them in the name of Law and Order.  With these pauper princes his children intermarried, and he fed them with his crumbs, and clothed them with scraps of his purple.  The visitor can see to-day, in every one of their dwarf palaces, some of his malachite vases, or porcelain bowls, or porphyry columns.