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Show THE CZAR'S ANNIVERSARY. The twenty fifth anniversary of the accession of Alexander II, to the throne of all the Russians must have been celebrated with fear and trembling. The apprehensions caused by the plots and threats of the Nihilists cannot be dispelled by glitter of pomp or affectation of loyalty. The Government having once given way to its panic terror, finds it impossible to regain its self-possession. The army is untainted with treason and the peasantry is too inert to be influenced by revolutionary ideas, but the disaffection of the townspeople and the educated class is steadily increasing. Authority is now grounded on intimidation rather than the traditional devotion of the masses for the sovereign, and after two years of reactionary zeal and military compression the Government finds itself too limp to stamp out disloyalty. After reigning for a quarter of a century, the Czar virtually confesses his inability to govern his subjects any longer, and, casting about for a suitable proxy, invests the son of an Armenian merchant with the absolute power of a military dictator. Himself the victim of a melancholy which has darkened the lives of so many of his ancestors, he shrinks back from the windows of his palace, and orders his soldiers to ransack the cellars for dynamite. It is a sorry anniversary for Alexander the Liberator. <br><br> For on this day it must not be forgotten that no sovereign of modern times has undertaken so many and such radical reforms as this same Alexander the Liberator. He not only set free twenty millions of serfs and endowed them with the rights of citizenship in the communes, but enabled them to become landed proprietors. In no other reign and in no other country has an experiment of equal magnitude in political and social science been made. In the United States the freedmen were given the right of suffrage, but in Russia emancipation was accompanied by a radical change in the conditions of land tenure. At the same time trial by jury was established, the radical tribunals were lifted above the level of provincial administration, and every department of the government except the secret police was reformed from the bottom; and while parliamentary institutions were withheld, the peasantry, which formed nine-tenths of the population of the Empire, were allowed to exercise all the functions of local self-rule. The Czar was a practical reformer at a time when reforming zeal was running riot, and in the early years of his reign an era of national regeneration seemed to be opening. Twenty-five years have gone by, and the monarch who was once a Liberal of the Liberals, heading the movement for free labor, local independence, and administrative reform, is now a prisoner in his own palace, with a military dictator outside. <br><br> It may be that the Czar will recall today what his father, the iron-handed Nicholas, is reported to have said almost with his last breath: "My successor may do as he pleases, but I cannot change." The humiliations of the Crimea did not modify the theory of absolute monarchy and military compression to which he had adhered for thirty years. He died as he had lived, with his faith in the efficacy of military despotism unshaken. His successor did as he pleased and left nothing unchanged; but it has come to pass [unreadable line] that he has abandoned Liberalism and reverted to his father's methods of intolerant administration. The illusions of reform have been dispelled. The serfs whom he enfranchised have not been transformed into sober and thrifty farmers. The people whom he sought to serve and bless with remedial measures are disappointed and ungrateful. If the father placed too implicit reliance upon absolutism, the son's expectations of the immediate results of a reform policy were overwrought and illusive. Yet were those reforms beneficent and enlightened. If Russian regeneration has not been accomplished in a quarter of a century, it is because nations are doomed to work out their salvation with fear and trembling - not with the panic terror and vacillation manifested in the Emperor's council chamber, but with a wholesome dread of economic conditions and race impulses, and with a resolute, determined effort - sometimes an agonizing struggle - to promote the progress of civilization. - N.Y. [New York] Tribune. |