who perished by hundreds of thousands in
the work. One hundred thousand died of
famine only.

The civilisation of the Russian capital is
not more than skin-deep. One may see this
any day in the streets. The pavements are
abominable. Only two or three streets are
lighted with gas; in the rest oil glimmers.
The oil lamps are the dimmer for being subject
to the peculation of officials. Three wicks
are charged for, and two only are burnt: the
difference is pocketed by the police. All the
best shops are kept by foreigners, the native
Russian shops being mostly collected in a
central bazaar, Gostinoi Dwor. The shopkeepers
appeal to the ignorance of a half-barbarous
nation by putting pictures of
their trades over their doors; and in his
shop a Russian strives to cheat with oriental
recklessness. Every shop in St. Petersburg
contains a mirror for the use of the customers.
"Mirrors," says the Englishwoman,
"hold the same position in Russia as clocks
do in England. With us time is valuable;
with them appearance. They care not though
it be mainly false appearance." They even
paint their faces. The lower classes of
women use a great deal of white paint,
and, as it contains mercury, it injures alike
health and skin. A young man paying his
court to a girl generally presents her with a
box of red and white paint to improve her
looks; and in the upper classes ladies are
often to be seen by one another, as they
arrive at a house, openly rouging their faces
before entering the drawing-room.

These are small things, indicative of an
extensive principle. Peter the Great undertook
to civilise Russia by a coup de main.
A walk is shown at St. Petersburg along
which he made women march unveiled
between files of soldiery to accustom them
to go unveiled. But civilisation is not
to be introduced into a nation by imperial
edict, and ever since Peter the Great's time
the Russian empire has been labouring to
stand for what it is not, namely, the equivalent
to nations that have become civilised in
the slow lapse of time. It can only support,
or attempt to support, this reputation by
deceit. It must hide, or attempt to hide-
and it has hidden from many eyes with
much success its mass of barbarism, while
by clever and assiduous imitation, as well
as by pretensions cunningly sustained, it
must put forward a show of having what it
only in some few directions even strives
to get.

The elements of civilisation Russia has, in a
copious language, soft and beautiful without
being effeminate, and a good-hearted people,
that would become a noble people under better
government. Their character is stained chiefly
by ignorance and fear. The best class of Russians
- especially those who are not tempted
by poverty to the meanness that in Russia is
almost the only road to wealth- are boundlessly
hospitable, kindly, amiable almost beyond
the borders of sincerity, but not with
the design of being insincere. They are
humane to their serfs; and although this
class suffers in Russia troubles that surpass
those of the negro slaves, it is not from the
proper gentlemen and ladies of the country
that this suffering directly comes. When the
noble proprietor himself lives in the white
house that peeps from among trees, side by
side with the gilt dome of its church, the
slaves on the estate are reasonably happy.
It is not true that a Russian gentleman is
frequently intoxicated. A Russian lady never
is so. Of the government functionaries, who
form a large class of the factitious nobility
and gentry of the empire, no good
is to be said: they are tempted to pillage
and extortion under a system that all radiates
from a great centre of deceit. Ostentation
is the rule. A post-master, a
colonel in rank, receiving forty pounds a year,
and without private estate, is to be seen
keeping a carriage, four horses, two foot-men,
and a coachman. His, wife goes extravagantly
dressed: she has two or three
children, a maid and a cook to keep; but she
can afford to pay a costly visit every season
to the capital. This system of false pretension
ruins the character of thousands upon
thousands. It makes of Russia what it is,-
a land eaten up with fraud and lying. Living
near such a colonel-postmaster, the Englishwoman
could observe his mode of operation.
He was about to pay a visit to St. Petersburg,
but wanted money. His expedient
was to send an enormous order for iron, for
the use of government, to a rich iron-master
in the town. The iron-master knew that gold,
not iron, was the metal wanted; and as he
dared not expose himself to the anger of a
government official, he was glad to compromise
the matter by the payment of a round
sum of silver roubles as a fine for default in
execution of the order. The habit of ostentation
- barbarous in itself, which destroys
the usefulness and credit of the employés of
government- tempts the poor nobles also to
a forfeiture of their own honour and self-respect.

It runs into everything. Even in the most
cultivated classes, few Russians who have not
gone out of Russia for their knowledge are
really well-informed. They have learnt two
or three modern languages, and little else.
Yet they cultivate a tact in conversing with
an air of wisdom upon topics about which
they are almost wholly uninformed, and after
an hour's sustainment of a false assumption,
show perhaps, by some senseless question,
that they cannot have understood properly a
syllable upon the points under discussion.
Their emptiness of mind is a political institution.
"If three Russians talk together, one
is a spy," stands with them as a social proverb.
They are forbidden to express their
own opinions upon great movements in the