whom the monarch’s pleasure has made noble in a day; and the whole ambition of the citizens is in consequence to have their sons made officers, in order that they may belong to the privileged class.  The result of this is, that young men’s education is finished at fifteen years of age; they are hurried into the army as soon as possible, and everything else is neglected.  This is not the time certainly to blame an order of things, which has produced so noble a resistance; were tranquility restored, it might be truly said, that under civil considerations, there are great deficiencies in the internal administration of Russia.  Energy and grandeur exist in the nation; but order and knowledge are still frequently wanting, both in the government, and in the private conduct of individuals.  Peter I. by making Russia European, certainly bestowed upon her great advantages; but these advantages he more than counter-balanced by the establishment of a despotism prepared by his father, and consolidated by him; Catherine II. on the contrary tempered the use of absolute power, of which she was not the author.  If the political state of Europe should ever be restored to peace:  in other words if one man were no longer the dispenser of evil to the world, we should see Alexander solely occupied with the improvement of his country! and in attempting to establish laws which would guarantee to it that happiness, of which the duration is as yet only secured for the life of its present ruler.

* (Note by the Editor) * This expression has been already quoted in the third volume of the Considerations on the French Revolution; but it deserves to be repeated.  All this, however, it must be remembered, was written at the end of 1812.  (End of Note by the Editor.)

From the emperor’s I went to his respectable mother’s, that princess to whom calumny has never been able to impute a sentiment unconnected with the happiness of her husband, her children, or the family of unfortunate persons of whom she is the protectress.  I shall relate, farther on, in what manner she governs that empire of charity, which she exercises in the midst of the omnipotent empire of her son.  She lives in the palace of the Taurida, and to get to her apartments you have to cross a hall, built by prince Potemkin, of incomparable grandeur; a winter garden occupies a part of it, and you see the trees and plants through the pillars which surround the middle inclosure.  Every thing in this residence is colossal; the conceptions of the prince who built it were fantastically gigantic.  He had towns built in the Crimea, solely that the empress might see them on her passage; he ordered the assault of a fortress, to please a beautiful woman, the princess Dolgorouki, who had disdained his suit, The favor of his Sovereign mistress created him such as he showed himself; but there is remarkable, notwithstanding, in the characters of most of the great men of Russia, such as Menzikoff, Suwarow, Peter I. himself, and