Such is the view presented by recent French and English writers who have made the condition of Russia a subject of minute investigation.  Mr. Noble deals more in generalizations than in details, and sets forth a theory which it is difficult to reconcile with the facts and conclusions derived from other sources.  According to him, Russia is, and has been from the first establishment of the imperial rule, in a state of chronic revolt.  This revolt is “the protest of eighty millions of people against their continued employment as a barrier in the path of peaceful human progress and national development.”  “It is not the educated classes alone, but the masses,—­peasant and artisan, land-owner and student,—­of whose aspirations, at least, it may be said, as it was said of the earliest and freest Russians, ‘Neminem ferant imperatorem.’” Before the rise of the empire “the Russians lived as freemen and happy.”  They “enjoyed what, in a political sense, we are fairly entitled to regard as the golden age of their national existence.”  The veche, or popular assembly, “was from a picturesque point of view the grandest, from an administrative point of view the simplest, and from a moral point of view the most equitable form of government ever devised by man.”  The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at all periods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol, or separation of the “Old Believers” from the Orthodox Church, and in the resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great:  “in the one as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority and all that it represented.”  It is admitted that “among the peasants the revolt must long remain in its passive stage....  Yet year by year, partly owing to educational processes, partly owing to propaganda, even the peasants are being won over to the growing battalions of discontent.”  The autocracy is “doomed.”  “The forces that undermine it are cumulative and relentless.”  Its “true policy is to spread its dissolution—­after the manner of certain financial operations—­over a number of years.”  “The method of the change is really not of importance.  The vital matter is that the reform shall at once concede and practically apply the principle of popular self-government, granting at the same time the fullest rights of free speech and public assembly.”  Finally, “the Tsar and his advisers” are bidden to “beware,” since “the spectacle of this frightfully unequal struggle ... is not lost upon Europe, or even upon America.”

The horrible crudity, as we are fain to call it, of the notions thus rhetorically set forth must be obvious to every reader acquainted with the history of the rise and growth of states in general, however little attention he may have given to those of Russia in particular.  The institutions of Russia differ fundamentally from those of other European states.  But the difference lies in historical conditions and development, not