The grim shadow of assassination pursued him wherever he went.  In 1879 the imperial train was destroyed by mines placed beneath the tracks.  In 1880 the imperial apartments in “the Winterhof” were partially wrecked by similar means.  Seventeen men marched stolidly to the gallows, regretting nothing except the failure of their crime; and hundreds more who were implicated in the plot were sent into perpetual exile in Siberia.  The hand never relaxed—­nor was the Constitution demanded by these atrocious means granted.

On the 13th of March, 1881, while the Emperor was driving, a bomb was thrown beneath his carriage.  He stepped out of the wreck unhurt.  Then as he approached the assassin, who had been seized by the police, another was thrown.  Alexander fell to the ground, exclaiming, “Help me!” Terribly mutilated, but conscious, the dying Emperor was carried into his palace, and there in a few hours he expired.

In the splendid obsequies of the Tsar, nothing was more touching than the placing of a wreath upon his bier by a deputation of peasants.  It can be best described in their own words.  The Emperor was lying in the Cathedral wrapped in a robe of ermine, beneath a canopy of gold and silver cloth lined with ermine.  “At last we were inside the church,” says the narrative.  “We all dropped on our knees and sobbed, our tears flowing like a stream.  Oh, what grief!  We rose from our knees, again we knelt, and again we sobbed.  This did we three times, our hearts breaking beside the coffin of our benefactor.  There are no words to express it.  And what honor was done us!  The General took our wreath, and placed it straightway upon the breast of our Little Father.  Our peasants’ wreath laid on his heart, his martyr breast—­as we were in all his life nearest to his heart!  Seeing this we burst again into tears.  Then the General let us kiss his hand—­and there he lay, our Tsar-martyr, with a calm, loving expression on his face—­as if he, our Little Father, had fallen asleep.”

If anything had been needed to make the name Nihilism forever odious, it was this deed.  If anything were required to reveal the bald wickedness of the creed of Nihilism, it was supplied by this aimless sacrifice of the one sovereign who had bestowed a colossal reform upon Russia.  They had killed him, and had then marched unflinchingly to the gallows—­and that was all—­leaving others bound by solemn oaths to bring the same fate upon his successor.  The whole energy of the organization was centered in secreting dynamite, awaiting a favorable moment for its explosion, then dying like martyrs, leaving others pledged to repeat the same horror—­and so ad infinitum.  In their detestation of one crime they committed a worse one.  They conspired against the life of civilization—­as if it were not better to be ruled by despots than assassins, as if a bad government were not better than none!