The Emperor recalled from Siberia the exiles of the conspiracy of 1825, and also the Polish exiles of 1831.  There was an honest effort made to reform the wretched judicial system and to adopt the methods which Western experience had found were the best.  The obstructions to European influences were removed, and all joined hands in an effort to devise means of bringing the whole people up to a higher standard of intelligence and well-being.  Russia was going to be regenerated.  Men, in a rapture of enthusiasm and with tears, embraced each other on the streets.  One wrote:  “The heart trembles with joy.  Russia is like a stranded ship which the captain and the crew are powerless to move; now there is to be a rising tide of national life which will raise and float it.”

Such was the prevailing public sentiment in 1861, when Emperor Alexander affixed his name to the measure which was going to make it forever glorious—­the emancipation of over twenty-three million human beings from serfdom.  It would require another volume to tell even in outline the wrongs and sufferings of this class, upon whom at last rested the prosperity and even the life of the nation, who, absolutely subject to the will of one man, might at his pleasure be conscripted for military service for a term of from thirty to forty years, or at his displeasure might be sent to Siberia to work in the mines for life; and who, in no place or at no time, had protection from any form of cruelty which the greed of the proprietor imposed upon them.  Selling the peasants without the land, unsanctioned by law, became sanctioned by custom, until finally its right was recognized by imperial ukases, so that serfdom, which in theory presented a mild exterior, was in practice and in fact a terrible and unmitigated form of human slavery.

Patriarchalism has a benignant sound—­it is better than something that is worse!  It is a step upward from a darker quagmire of human condition.  When Peter the Great, with his terrible broom, swept all the free peasants into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and when he established the empire upon a chain of service to be rendered to the nobility by the peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in the social unit—­the family.  And while he was Europeanizing the surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment—­an incongruity which in time must bring disorder, and compel radical and difficult reforms.

To remove a foundation stone is a delicate and difficult operation.  It needed courage of no ordinary sort to break up this serfdom encrusted with tyrannies.  It was a gigantic social experiment, the results of which none could foresee.  Alexander’s predecessors had thought and talked of it, but had not dared to try it.  Now the time was ripe, and the man on the throne had the nerve required for its execution.