Here are (he adds) three facts that contradict this marriage: The 7th (18th) of May, 1711, the Czarevitch Alexis, son of Peter I., by his marriage with Eudoxie Laponhine (afterwards divorced and shut up in a convent), being at Brunswick, where he was about to marry the Princess Charlotte of BrunswickBevern, wrote to Catherine in Russia the following letter, which commenced with the French word "madame :"

'MADAME,-I am told that my father has declared you to be his wife. (This in allusion to her having been crowned empress.) I pray you accept my compliments, and continue your good feelings towards me; upon the latter I permit myself to reckon. I dare not write to my father to congratulate him, not having received any news by writing upon the subject."

Alexis congratulates Catherine neither upon the celebration of a marriage, nor upon the publication of a marriage previously concluded: he congratulates her with having been declared to be a wife. The original letter exists in the archives.

On the occasion of the prosecution of the czarevitch in 1718, that prince, frequently put to the torture, acknowledged, after having been put to the question on the 8th of February, that at the time of his departure from Russia, in October, 1716, he met, between Riga and Liban, his aunt, Princess Mary (sister of Peter I., who was returning from Carlsbad). Princess Mary said to him, among other things, "Your mother (the ex-Czarine Eudoxie, shut up in a convent) has had visions telling her that your father would take her back again, would live with her, and she should have children." Taking the visions at what they are worth, it remains clear that if Peter had been wedded with Catherine, the Princess Mary never could have said that her brother might once more live with the Czarine Eudoxie. This passage, omitted in the printed text of the czarevitch's. trial, exists in the official manuscript. Lastly, three months afterwards, the 18th of May, the Czarevitch Alexis, after having been once more subjected to torture, acknowledged that the Archbishop of Riazane had said to him, "Be prudent; your father cannot marry whilst his wife is alive; he will never take her back from the convent, and yet we must have a heir to the crown!"

Prince Dolgoroukow does not say much in reference to himself in his work, as he reserves that for his "Memoirs," the materials for which, as well as other important documents, are, we gather from various passages in the work, in this country. But it is evident from the following extract that he has suffered more than enough to make him a partisan :

In 1843, we published in Paris, under the pseudonym of Count d'Almagro, a pamphlet on the Russian nobility, in which we spoke of the States-General of 1613. The Emperor Nicholas, irritated, ordered us to return to Russia. We accordingly went back. Madame N., impelled by personal spite, and the Sieur Jacques T., a Russian spy, had denounced us as being part of I do not know what conspiracy. Our papers were examined, and proofs soon obtained that we had never conspired. We were then ordered, in the emperor's name, to go and occupy a small administrative employment at Viatka. We refused, basing our refusal on the right given by the law to every Russian nobleman to serve, or not to serve, as he likes. The emperor thereupon ordered us to go in exile to Viatka, where we should be placed under the surveillance of the police; and he prescribed, before our departure for exile, that a medical man should be sent to us to attest our sanity. The doctor came, and we must do him the justice to say that he was much confused at the ridiculous position in which he was placed. We could not help remarking to him that one of the most manifest proofs of folly consisted in looking upon persons in their senses as fools. He smiled, pretended not to understand, and, after five minutes' conversation about the rain and fine weather, withdrew, never having gone beyond the bounds of an extreme politeness, or having addressed to us the slightest question. The report went abroad

at that time in St. Petersburg that we had been flogged by the emperor's order, as several men and women indubitably were under his reign. It is not so, how ever, with regard to ourselves; if it had been true, we should never have hesitated to proclaim it aloud, as we relate the doctor's visit. The ignominious treatment to which a despot subjects those who are in his power, and who can obtain no redress, are acts of the basest cowardice; they cover with dishonour and infamy not the victims who are subjected to such, but the tyrant who orders them, and who, in so doing, gives himself up to public contempt.

It is needless to say that the prince does not intend to go back again to Russia; he appears to have adopted Paris as a séjour d'agrément, and London as a safe refuge in times of trouble. Hence he is no more lenient with the existing state of things than with the past, albeit granting great qualities to the present emperor. "We have just learned," he says in a postscript to one of his chapters, "that M. Ounkovski, formerly marshal of the nobility of Tver, and M. Européous, gentleman of Tver, have been exiled, the first to Viatka, and the second to Perm, for having believed that the rights of the nobility were really granted to them. Voilà un beau régime: l'Empereur Nicolas n'aurait pas mieux fait !"

That, in a country where peculation pervades all ranks, and venality is rife from high to low, the grossest malpractices should exist in the administration of military affairs and military contracts, could only be anticipated. None of that grievous surprise is exacted similar to what was experienced when the old, sedate, paternal, and bigoted government of Austria was found to be corrupt to the core. The last war (1853-1856), says the prince, came to reveal in all its horror the frightful state of the Russian military administration, completely given up to that bureaucracy which considers theft as its right.

General Z., appointed to the general direction of the administration of the army, named his father-in-law Sch- chief of the military commissariat, and gave to his brother-in-law W. a place in the administration. It is thus that in Russia they administer by families. The troops received mouldy biscuits and rotten meat; several of the colonels were paid by Z. to tolerate this robbery; those who conducted themselves as honest men, and complained, found that all representations were in vain, Z. being powerfully protected by the whole of the bureaucracy.

The chiefs of the "company of beeves" (volovii roty), selected by Z., when receiving from him, say, five hundred oxen, were made to sign a receipt for six hundred. They had no other alternative but to complete the number by seizing upon such cattle as might fall into their hands in the localities traversed by the troops, and that is just what they did. At the same time, the inferior local authorities would readily deliver over a certificate asserting the death of an animal that had never existed for a bribe of some five or six roubles. On the occasion of the retreat of our troops from the banks of the Danube into Russia, the chief of one of these beeves, or cattle companies, had a dead ox conveyed on a cart for many hundreds of miles, and at every halt he obtained a certificate for one that day deceased. Speaking generally, in this last war cattle formed one of the most lucrative branches of bureaucratic peculation. Thus, one day government received an official report that a new depôt of eighteen hundred oxen had, been formed in that part of the province of the Crimea which is situated beyond the peninsula. These oxen never existed. Yet were they supposed to have been purchased, supposed to have been fed for several months, after the lapse of which time they were reported to have been slain, and to have been salted-salt having also been purchased for that purpose-and each of these mythological oxen brought to the inventors of this proceeding about 300 roubles, or 1200 francs!

On the occasion of the occupation of the Danubian Provinces by our troops in 1853, the order was given from St. Petersburg to make large purchases of

barley, oats, hay, &c. Z. only used a very small proportion of the money sent for these purchases on the purpose intended. When our troops had to evacuate these provinces hurriedly in 1854, Z. presented to the commander-in-chief a report, in which he represented the utter impossibility of removing the vast magazines which he was supposed to have organised. An order was accordingly sent to destroy them, but as there was little or nothing to burn, a number of Wallachian and Moldavian barns and granaries were fired, and the feat was achieved.

People of all classes, from both metropolises and all parts of the empire, sent clothing materials and objects of primary necessity to the army; but nothing reached the soldiers, who were often in want of the most indispensable objects. The goods sent to the Crimea no sooner reached the administration than they were divided among the different chiefs for their personal use, or sold to the Jews, who circulated them to their advantage.

This, we are told, although the gifts for the soldiers, presided over by the Empress Marie herself, were entrusted to the care of Count Michel Wielhorski and Prince Gregory Dolgoroukow, both of whom ultimately perished of typhus in carrying out, or rather attempting to carry out, the charge entrusted to them.

When our unfortunate soldiers, so much to be admired for their courage, their abnegation, and their resignation, happened to be so wounded that they could be transported to hospitals at a distance from the field of battle, they were placed on carts, the very clothes which had been sent to them being refused to them. Scarcely covered with old military great-coats, torn and full of holes, they were led away, during the severity of the winter season, regardless of their sufferings and privations. There were provisional military hospitals in all towns and large places, the heads of which, instead of interesting themselves in the welfare of the unfortunates that were brought to them, left them to moan on the carts for hours together, whilst they were feasting, im, bibing champagne, or gambling. Did any of the unfortunates die, their names were entered on the hospital list, their bodies were deposited in cellars where the cold would preserve them for a considerable time from decomposition, and, in the mean time, the charges for feeding the deceased, and of the medicines supposed to have been employed in the treatment of their cases, were entered upon the list of hospital expenses. When the cellars became too full of dead bodies, they were put into coffins hastily constructed, and removed to the burial-ground. Often have these badly constructed coffins been seen to break down even on this short transit, and the bodies roll upon the soil in a state of utter nakedness; they were not even wrapped in linen, the charge for which was monopolised, like all other things, by the military administration.

We were not, it appears, the only sufferers from mismanagement in the Crimea. The French suffered quite as much as we did, and the unfortunate Muscovite had the venality of his superiors pitted against him, in addition to all the other accumulated evils of war, exposure, privation, and climate. Well may the Russian official of every minor degree afford to drink champagne ! "I saw in the Crimea," said an old soldier to Prince Dolgoroukow, "French soldiers and Sardinian soldiers: ah, those were happy fellows! They were well fed, and treated with consideration. As to us, we were in want of the common necessaries of life; we were first robbed, and then beaten by those who robbed us."

The papers have alluded to a proposal made by the Rothschilds to purchase the railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow for a sum of eighty millions of roubles in gold. This would have been a magnificent thing for Russia. But the offer was not accepted, not because the eighty millions would not have been a fair price for a line which, thanks to the

venality of the bureaucracy, has cost one hundred and twenty millions of roubles, and brings in little or nothing, but because the said bureaucracy did not like to see themselves superseded by a house which would not countenance malversation and robbery, and which might summon the whole Russian administration at the bar of European public opinion, to be scouted as it deserves.

The civil list is, it appears, open to many reforms in Russia. It has been the custom hitherto, however low the state of finances, to build a special palace for every one of the grand-dukes on the occasion of their settling in life. Half a century ago Alexander I. had three brothers, of whom only one had sons; in the present day, the Emperor Alexander II. has five sons, three brothers, and four nephews-altogether, twelve granddukes. Following this progression, Russia may expect to be able to boast by the end of the present century of more than fifty grand-dukes. It must not be forgotten that under Peter I., a century and a half ago, there were nineteen princes Galitsyne, of whom seven only in the present day have descendants in the male line, yet there are now upwards of one hundred and twenty princes Galitsyne living.

When the empress-mother travels, she is not attended by a mere suite, but by a whole tribe of servitors of all grades and positions. A whole hotel is always taken beforehand, at an expense of from three to four thousand francs a day. Upon the occasion of her passage of the Simplon in 1859, fresh horses had to be sent on for miles, and even then a portion of the followers and baggage had to proceed to Nice by way of Mount Cenis. 66 If," says Prince Dolgoroukow, "they fancy at the court of Russia that, by such exorbitant and unpardonable wastefulness, they produce an effect worthy of the power of a vast empire in Europe, they are much in error, for it is the contrary effect that is produced. These journeys, marked by the seal of an Oriental and purely Asiatic luxury, only excite laughter in Europe, where they take us for half-civilised people, entertaining the wish worthy of Asia, of dazzling by our display."

But of all the evils that Russia groans under, that of the political police is transcendent in its bad working; it is not only that it makes personal liberty an uncertainty, but it undermines all social ties. It also opens an almost inexhaustible field for plunder, of which its acolytes, it can be readily imagined, are not slow to avail themselves. The ordinary process is simple enough:

A wealthy man is arrested.

"What am I accused of ?" inquires the trembling victim.

"Of having taken part in treasonable proceedings."

"But I have always kept aloof from all society, and been most careful not to mix myself up with political matters."

"So much the better for you; it will be easy to justify yourself after one or two interrogatories."

"When shall I be examined?"

"Oh, every one is examined in his turn, according to the date of his arrestation."

"Will my turn come soon?"

"Hum! there are more than two thousand imprisoned before you; your turn may possibly come in two or three years' time.

Seeing the effect produced by this astounding piece of intelligence, the

police agent begins to insinuate that by the sacrifice of a certain sum of money (the demand being regulated by the previously well-ascertained means of the victim) he may be at once liberated. There is no resisting the alternative. When, however, as sometimes happens, the alternative is refused, then the victims are loaded with chains, consigned to dungeons, subjected to the most frightful tortures, and martyrised, till, to save themselves from insupportable agony, they plead guilty. They are then sent to Siberia, and their property is passed over to their heirs if Russians, but confiscated if Poles.

Instances have been known, and happily too many, in which on the return of persons thus unjustly_exiled, their property has been restored to them by their heirs; but Prince Dolgoroukow details many sad instances where the contrary has been the case. The senator Paul Divow took possession of the lands of his exiled nephew, and left the latter in abject misery, refusing to send him even the slightest assistance! The unfortunate man having appealed for even a small sum of money, the only answer he got from the man who was living on his estate, was that he did not recognise a rebel for his nephew! The senator Dmitri Lanskoi, whose wife was aunt and heir to Prince Alexander Odoievski, betrayed and delivered up the latter to the police upon the occasion of his taking refuge in his house and asking for a single night's asylum. By this act he became possessor of his worldly goods. The young Divow and Prince Odoievski both perished in the Caucasus in exile.

Not only are social relations thus broken up by such a frightful state of things, but mistakes of an almost ludicrous character sometimes occur. Thus, for example, Prince Peter Dolgoroukow, the author of the work before us, has occasion to explain that when Herzen, the well-known editor of the Memoirs of Catherine, speaks of certain discreditable acts of Prince Dolgoroukow at Perm and Viatka, Prince Peter having been an exile at both these places, naturally thought that he was the person alluded to; but he declares that it was a Prince Michel. Herzen, versed in the peculiarities of Russia, where, as we have before seen, there are upwards of one hundred and twenty princes of the same name, ought to have distinguished between one and another when penning anything that was likely to be detractory to a whole tribe or clan of princes.

But even Prince Peter Dolgoroukow's morality has, according to his own admission, been sorely tried: it was when the priesthood were enrolled among the fraternity of the political police.

Here is what happened to us at Moskow, a few years after our return from exile at Viatka! The priest to whom we were confessing that year, asked us if we loved the emperor? Never shall we forget that solemn moment; our confusion was extreme: to speak the truth was to be sent back to Viatka, a thing we had no desire to do. To lie is always an indignity; besides, one cannot deceive God, who sees into the depths of human conscience, and knows the most secret thoughts. After a moment's reflection, we addressed the following mental prayer to God. "O Lord, thou seest with what individuals I have to do in this country; pardon me, in Thy infinite mercy, the disgraceful falsehood that I am obliged to tell!" And the prelate repeating the question: "Do you love the emperor ?" we answered, "Yes." It was doing that which was wrong, we know it, and to punish ourselves we make public acknowledgment of it, but we had no wish to return into exile, and was it not an atrocious government which could so degrade religion as to make of it a branch of political detection and inquisition?