brother, Nicolas. This renunciation was known only to Alexander and their mother, the Dowager Empress Maria, and kept secret even from Nicolas himself. Two years later Alexander died. Then ensued between the two surviving brothers a contest almost without parallel. Constantine, then governor of Poland, ordered the troops at Warsaw to swear allegiance to Nicolas. Nicolas at St Petersburg ordered the troops throughout Russia to swear allegiance to Constantine. The fraternal rivalry continued for three weeks. It was ended only by the solemn declaration of Constantine that he had once renounced the succession, and that nothing could induce him to go back upon his word.
Constantine was the older. Moreover, he was a soldier and the idol of the army, which had been determined to enthrone him against his will. Nicholas was a younger brother and almost unknown. There then existed in the country two secret organizations — the Society of the North and the Society of the South — both imbued with the ideas of the French Revolution and hostile to the autocracy. By them the devotion of the masses to the principle of legiti- macy was cunningly made to serve an attempt at revolution. Some of the colonels at the capital, though favorable to Constantine, were inclined to this lib- eral party. Those officers ordered their men to shout, "Long live Constantine" and "Long live the Constitution" (Constitutza)! "Who is this Constitutza?" asked the puzzled soldiers. "Long live Constitutza! She must be Constantine's wife." One colonel cried, "Long live the Republic!" The sol- diers said, "Who is Republic? That is not the name of the Tsar." The colonel replied that it was the sort of government they were going to set up and that there would not be any Tsar in it. "Oh," said the soldiers, " then it isn't the right thing for Russia. We have got to have a Tsar." And they themselves arrested the colonel. Nicolas I, his son Alexander II, his son Alexander III, his son Nicolas II, the present Tsar, such is the succession since that time to the present hour. It is not unusual to speak of these men as irresponsible autocrats and to regard the Russian system as an irre- sponsible autocracy. But an irrespon- sible autocrat never has held the scepter, and irresponsible autocracy never has existed, even in phlegmatic Russia. An irresponsible autocrat among people of Indo-European stock is an utter impossibility. Each autocrat is weighed in the balances and judged — if need be punished — by those over whom he reigns. This judgment no Russian autocrat from the accession of Michael Romanoff has escaped. The kindly, well-intentioned, feeble, self-contradictory, ill-starred Nicolas II is being weighed in that balance now. Your judgment and mine, the judgment of foreigners or of posterity, will concern or affect him little. But long-suffering, patient, little exacting as the Russian people are, they are inexorable as fate, merciless as doom once their judgment made.
The dumb popular heart makes no harsh or hard demand upon its sovereigns. It asks that the autocrat shall be profoundly Russian, Russian in feeling and sympathy, in orthodoxy and faith, in fidelity to old tradition, in heart-whole devotion to her whom the peasant reverently calls "Holy Russia." It asks that he shall develop the na- tional resources and augment the na- tional strength ; that he shall increase the national territory and maintain the prestige of the national arms ; that he shall keep Russia's name glorious. This is not too much to require of him to whom the nation has intrusted its all.
THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE TSARS
When Peter III, unnatural and debauched, drank in his orgies to the success of foreign troops and gloated over
