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 reason 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 and 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.[I]

[Footnote I:  For choice specimens of these reasonings, see Von Erman, Archiv fuer Wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland.]

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 those two main products of Russian civilization,—­dissolute lords and abject serfs.

But what to do?  Nicholas tried to help his Empire by setting right any individual wrongs whose reports broke their way to him.

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.