Russia is the chosen home of tyranny now, but her day of brightness will come again.  It is safe to prophesy so much, for I remember what happened at one time of supreme peril.  Prussia and Austria and Italy lay crushed and bleeding under the awful power of Napoleon, and it seemed as though Russia must be wiped out from the list of nations when the great army of invaders poured in relentless multitudes over the stricken land.  The conqueror appeared to have the very forces of nature in his favour, and his hosts moved on without a check and without a failure of organization.  So perfectly had he planned the minutest details that, although his stations were scattered from the Beresina to the Seine, not so much as a letter was lost during the onward movement.  How could the doomed country resist?  So thought all Europe.  But the splendid old Russian, the immortal Koutousoff, had felt the pulse of his nation, and he was confident, while all the other chiefs felt as though the earth were rocking under them.  The time for the extinction of Russia had not come; a throb of fierce emotion passed over the country; the people rose like one man, and the despot found himself held in check by rude masses of men for whom death had scant terrors.  Koutousoff had a mighty people to support him, and he would have swept back the horde of spoilers, even if the winter had not come to his aid.  Russia was but a dark country then, as now, but the conduct of the myriads who dared to die gave a bright presage for the future.  Who can blame the multitudes of Muscovites who sealed their wild protest with their blood?  The common soldiers were but slaves, yet they would have suffered a degradation worse than slavery had they succumbed, while, as to the immense body of people—­that nation within a nation—­which answered to our upper and middle classes, they would have tasted the same woes which at length drove Germany to frenzy and made simple burghers prefer bitter death to the tyranny of the French.  The rulers of Russia have stained her records foully since the days of 1812, but their worst sins cannot blot out the memory of the national uprising.  Years are but trivial; seventy-six of them seem a long time; but those who study history broadly know that the dawn of a better future for Russia showed its first gleam when the aroused and indignant race rose and went forward to die before the French cannon.  When next Russia rises, it will be against a tyranny only second to Napoleon’s in virulence—­it will be against the terror that rules her now from within; and her success will be applauded by the world.

The Italians, who first waited and plotted, and then fought desperately under Garibaldi, had every reason to cry out for freedom.  If they had remained merely whimpering under the Bourbon and Austrian whips, they would have deserved to be spurned by all who bear the hearts of men.  They were denied the meanest privileges of humanity; they lived in a fashion which was rather like the violent, oppressed, hideous