Perhaps the most ingenious means for preventing administrative abuses was devised by the Emperor Nicholas I. Fully aware that he was regularly and systematically deceived by the ordinary officials, he formed a body of well-paid officers, called the gendarmerie, who were scattered over the country, and ordered to report directly to his Majesty whatever seemed to them worthy of attention.  Bureaucratic minds considered this an admirable expedient; and the Tsar confidently expected that he would, by means of these official observers who had no interest in concealing the truth, be able to know everything, and to correct all official abuses.  In reality the institution produced few good results, and in some respects had a very pernicious influence.  Though picked men and provided with good salaries, these officers were all more or less permeated with the prevailing spirit.  They could not but feel that they were regarded as spies and informers—­a humiliating conviction, little calculated to develop that feeling of self-respect which is the main foundation of uprightness—­and that all their efforts could do but little good.  They were, in fact, in pretty much the same position as Peter’s Procurator-General, and, with true Russian bonhomie, they disliked ruining individuals who were no worse than the majority of their fellows.  Besides this, according to the received code of official morality insubordination was a more heinous sin than dishonesty, and political offences were regarded as the blackest of all.  The gendarmerie officers shut their eyes, therefore, to the prevailing abuses, which were believed to be incurable, and directed their attention to real or imaginary political delinquencies.  Oppression and extortion remained unnoticed, whilst an incautious word or a foolish joke at the expense of the Government was too often magnified into an act of high treason.

This force still exists under a slightly modified form.  Towards the close of the reign of Alexander II. (1880), when Count Loris Melikof, with the sanction and approval of his august master, was preparing to introduce a system of liberal political reforms, it was intended to abolish the gendarmerie as an organ of political espionage, and accordingly the direction of it was transferred from the so-called Third Section of his Imperial Majesty’s Chancery to the Ministry of the Interior; but when the benevolent monarch was a few months afterwards assassinated by revolutionists, the project was naturally abandoned, and the Corps of Gendarmes, while remaining nominally under the Minister of the Interior, was practically reinstated in its former position.  Now, as then, it serves as a kind of supplement to the ordinary police, and is generally employed for matters in which secrecy is required.  Unfortunately it is not bound by those legal restrictions which protect the public against the arbitrary will of the ordinary authorities.  In addition to its regular duties it has a vaguely