himself was to turn from Byron to Shakespeare, and to hold up a mirror in which Russia might see her own nature and, beyond, the Pan-Slav vision of herself as the ocean into which all Slav streams are merged. But during the last years of Alexander the revolutionary influence was the strongest. To talk treason, almost openly, became the fashion; the army and society were honey-combed with secret societies; and elaborate revolutionary plots were hatched in the very precincts of the Imperial palace.

It is in the account of these revolutionary under-currents that M. Waliszewski's book reaches its highest point of interest; for, as he points out, it is only in recent years that liberty of research has allowed light to be thrown on these matters, which, from the point of view of the present, have a special significance. In these revolutionary movements he traces some of the elements which in our own day have appeared in a monstrously exaggerated form in Bolshevism, notably the tendency to push theories to extremes, to the neglect of facts. But there was then no Lenin to give force and direction to the spirit of discontent. Some leaders there were who, like Pestel, were prepared to go to all lengths in order to overthrow the Tsardom and remodel Russia on the lines of her older tradition-for the movement was Russian, not international. But others, like Nicholas Muraviev, were of the class of thosenot unknown in England-who fan the embers of revolution, only in the end to play the part of firemen. The movement moreover was not a popular one. Young aristocrats, including many officers of the Guards, joined the secret societies because it seemed the proper thing to do. There were pure and ardent spirits among them, as the Dekabrist rising was to prove after Alexander's death. But in the main, as M. Waliszewski points out, the movement was characterised by indecision of mind, weakness of character, complete confusion of ideas, and by the same tendency to rely on eloquence rather than acts as that which marked a phase of the recent revolution in Russia.

The Emperor, fully informed by his spies, was well aware of this revolutionary ferment, and for him the secret societies had few secrets. Yet, so far from taking any vigorous measures to suppress the movement, he seemed even to encourage it by his attitude and language. The charge brought against him by Professor Schiemann is merely one of inaction: "He watched the growth of the revolutionary movement as one watches a stageplay." This attitude may have been due to the old conflict in his

own mind, which led him to try to reconcile a policy more and more reactionary, begotten of fear of the revolutionary peril, with "the recurrent inspirations of a platonic Liberalism." It may have been due to the consciousness of his own part in fomenting the trouble. To his aide-de-camp, Prince Vassilchikov, who brought him news of a plot, he said: "You know that I have shared and encouraged these illusions and errors. It is not for me to rage against them." But M. Waliszewski puts a far more damning interpretation on Alexander's attitude. He points out that Alexander did rage against these errors and illusions, to the extent which he judged consistent with his own security, but continued to coquet with Liberalism in order to keep alive public faith in his good intentions and so to prevent the reformers from being driven to counsels of despair. Agents provocateurs, says M. Waliszewski, have always been active in Russia, and he suggests that the pupil of La Harpe was among their number.

Force seems to be given to this indictment by M. Waliszewski's analysis of the Tsar's motives in failing to publish before his death the family agreement by which the succession had been settled on the Grand Duke Nicholas, to the exclusion of his elder brother, Constantine. In this whole matter, M. Waliszewski argues with some force, the Emperor with his father Paul's fate ever before his eyes-was seeking to guard himself by leaving the succession doubtful, so that there might be no certain heir round whom the disaffected might gather. However this may be, it is certainly difficult otherwise to explain the neglect which, after Alexander's death, made possible the tragic episode of the Dekabrist rising.

He

It was, indeed, partly fear, partly the weariness which had led him so often to talk of abdicating, that caused Alexander in his later years to retire more and more into the background. "virtually abdicated," handing over the conduct of affairs to his friend, the ruthlessly efficient Count Arakcheyev, whom he studied to make responsible in the eyes of the people for all his repressive measures.* Much of his new leisure he spent in pious exercises; but, from time to time, his restless spirit drove him to make long journeys through his vast dominions in order to see

*"Continuing his coquetry with Liberalism and, in everything which contradicted this pose, hiding himself behind Arakcheyev, even going so far as to make him copy and sign orders and instructions which he himself had drafted." Waliszewski, iii. 182, with a reference to the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich, "Alexandre 1er". i, 262

for himself how his people were faring. Disappointment awaited him, especially in Poland, which showed what, to him, seemed a strange ingratitude for the national existence and free institutions which he had secured for her; but then, as Adam Czartoryski said, he "was willing that all men should be free, so long as they freely did his will alone." For the rest, in these hectic travels, he gained a certain popularity; for the charm of his manner remained, he was still capable of generous impulses, and it pleased him to exercise his autocratic power in redressing minor wrongs.

It was in the course of one of these journeyings that he met his death. In the autumn of 1825 he travelled southward, ostensibly for the benefit of his dying wife, to whom he had returned at last after thirty years of shameful neglect. The diplomatic world, as usual, was suspicious; and the suspicions became alarms when he established himself and his Empress at Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, a cold, malodorous and malarial spot, utterly unsuited for an invalid, but a convenient observation post in case of an attack on Turkey. The alarms were, however, groundless, as M. Waliszewski shows. The last things the Emperor was thinking about were the Greeks and Turks. He had projected a long itinerary through his southern dominions : the Crimea, the regions of the lower Volga, and Georgia; but only the first part of this programme was destined to be carried out. It is to Alexander's credit that on these wanderings he never spared himself. The greater part of the month of November he spent in the Crimea going from place to place, in wretched weather and over all but impassable roads, sometimes in a carriage, sometimes on horseback, sometimes even on foot, inspecting institutions, reviewing troops, and investigating into this and that. He was seized with the fever of the country, but persisted in his attempt to fulfil his engagements until it was clear that further effort was impossible. He had persisted too long, and was carried back to Taganrog to die. His unhappy wife attended him on his death-bed, and soon followed him to the grave.*

*The story that Alexander only feigned death in order to carry out his oft-expressed intention of abdicating and retiring from the world, and that he survived until 1864 in the person of a Siberian hermit named Feodor Kuzmich, is now wholly discredited. The letters of the Empress Elizabeth should alone have been conclusive proof of the falseness of this legend.

Recent historians have passed severe judgment upon the character and life work of Alexander. Professor Schiemann, in the first volume of his History of Russia under Nicholas I, thus sums up the results of his rule :

He left behind him a world of brutal facts: the uncertainty as to the succession to the Empire, due to his fault; a great, organized military conspiracy, the existence of which he had known for four years, and of which he had watched the development as a spectator watches a stage-play; he left the Polish problem, which he had created, and the Turkish imbroglio, accentuated to a point where the choice lay between political humiliation and war; he left a venal justice and an administration in which arbitrariness and injustice held the reins, an educational system rotten with official hypocrisy, a Church of which the most influential heads were men like Seraphim and Photius, economic and financial conditions only beginning to emerge from complete ruin, and finally the curse of Russia-serfdom.

But the most fatal of his legacies were the principles of government which produced these results, principles which were faithfully followed by his successors. They are being followed, as M. Waliszewski rightly points out, even now. It is a common error, he says, to accuse the revolutionaries of 1917 of overthrowing the Empire of the Tsars. "Have they not preserved, in principle and even-save for some insignificant externals-in form, the apparatus of government which, in the course of centuries, raised and sustained the prodigious edifice? The Colossus carried in itself the cause of its fall; the shocks which in our own day have shaken all the world could not leave it standing, and the triumphant revolution did no more than plant the red flag on a ruin, masked hitherto only by imperial pomps."

W. ALISON PHILLIPS

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VOL. 243. NO. 495.

WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER

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The Home Office.

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3.

By SIR EDWARD TROUP.
1925.

(Whitehall Series).

By H. D. TRAILL, revised by SIR HENRY CRAIK.

The King's Government. By R. H. GRETTON. G. Bell & Sons. 1913. 4. Delegated Legislation. By C. T. CARR. Cambridge University Press.

5.

1923.

Return of Persons Employed and Salaries in Public Offices, 1828-9. No. 214 of 1831.

6. Report of Select Committee on Miscellaneous Expenditure, 1847-8. Vol. xviii., Part I.

7. Report on the Organization of the Permanent Civil Service, 1854. 8. Report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service. Cd. 7338. 1914. 9. Report of Joint Committee on the Organization, etc. of the Civil Service. Stationery Office. 1922.

SOM

OMEONE has said that the characteristic feature of the English polity is to be found in the association of the justice of the peace, who is a gentleman, with a clerk who knows the law. Far be it from me to suggest that the magistrate is invariably distinguished from the clerk, or the clerk from the magistrate, by the differentia of ignorance, of birth or even of manners; but it is undeniably true that the principle of the association of the amateur and the expert runs through the whole gamut of public life in England from the House of Commons to the Board of Guardians. Jury and judge, the mayor and the town clerk, the magistrate and his clerk, the parliamentary minister and the permanent civil servant: the principle extends far beyond the classical case quoted above, though it is that instance which has been satirised and immortalised by a series of great English novelists. Everyone will recall the relations between Squire Western and his clerk in " Tom Jones "; between Justice Foxley and his clerk, Nicholas Faggot, in "Red Gauntlet "; and above all, the colloquy between Mr. Nupkins, the magistrate, and the clerk, Mr. Jinks, in "Pickwick." As an acute American commentator on English institutions has observed: "The relationship between the titular holder of a public post, enjoying the honours, and assuming the responsibility, of office, and a subordinate who,