that time reform followed reform.  The condition of the soldiers, who had virtually been slaves under Nicholas I, was greatly improved, and a proclamation was issued for the emancipation of the peasants, slaves not for a limited time only, but for life and from generation to generation.  It cost the United States five years of fratricidal agony, a billion of dollars, and about half a million of lives, to liberate five or six millions of negroes; Russia, in one memorable day (February 19, 1861), liberated nearly twenty-two millions of muzhiks (peasants), and gave them full freedom, by a mere stroke of the pen of the “tsar osvobodityel,” the Liberator Czar, Alexander II (1856-1881).

Other innovations, of less magnitude but nevertheless of far-reaching importance, were introduced later.  Capital punishment, which still disgraces human justice in more enlightened states, was unconditionally abolished; the number of offences amenable to corporal punishment was gradually reduced, until, on April 29, 1863, all the horrors of the gauntlet, the spur, the lash, the cat, and the brand, were consigned to eternal oblivion.  The barbarous system of the judiciary was replaced by one that could render justice “speedy, righteous, merciful, and equitable.”  Railway communication, postal and telegraph service, police protection, the improvement of the existing universities, the opening of many new primary schools, and the introduction of compulsory school attendance, told speedily on the intellectual development of the people.  In the words of Shumakr, Russia experienced “a complete inward revival.”  Old customs seemed to disappear, all things were become new.  New life, new hope, new aspirations throbbed in the hearts of the subjects of the gigantic empire, and better times were knocking at their doors. Joli tout le monde, le diable est mort!

This era of great reforms and the resuscitation of all that is good and noble in the Slavonic soul brought about also a moral regeneration.  The colossus who, according to Turgenief, preferred to sleep an endless sleep, with a jug of vodka in his clutched fingers, proved that he, too, was human, with a feeling, human heart beating in his bosom.  With the restoration of peace and the abolition of serfhood, there began a removal of prejudice even against Jews.  Hitherto the foremost litterateurs in Russia, imitating the writers of other lands, had painted the Jew as a monstrosity.  Pushkin’s prisoner, Gogol’s traitor, Lermontoff’s spy, and Turgenief’s Zhid (Jew) were caricatures and libels, equal in acrimony, and not inferior in art, to Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin.  But now the best and ablest men of letters signed a protest against such unjust and impossible characters.