AN INSTRUCTIVE CONTRAST.
By Editor
In 1865 the President of the United States was assassinated at the capital of the country. It was at the close of a long and terrible civil war. The whole nation was at fever heat. No circumstances in the dramatic and terrible incidents of the tragedy, and in the public sentiment of the entire nation, were wanting to make the event a national calamity, and to lead from it to national convulsion and disaster. In fact, however, the government passed by an easy transition from the President to the Vice-President. Though the political character of the Executive was suddenly changed, the nation went on in comparative peace and quietness. Military law was not proclaimed, arbitrary arrests were not made, and no citizen was disturbed in the possession of his peace, liberty, or property. The week before last, an assassin attempted to shoot the Czar of all the Russias. The attempt was a failure. He was pursued and instantly arrested. There was nothing in the incident, nothing apparently in the condition of the country, to cause a revolution, or to call for extraordinary measures of national precaution; but, in fact, all Russia is convulsed, from the center to the circumference. Arrests have been made by the thousand. Military law has been proclaimed in the six greatest cities of the empire, and in the provinces of which they are respectively the centers. This means that in every one of these provinces the life, and liberty, and property of every citizen are subject to the irresponsible decree of the Governor-General of that province. He may be at any moment torn away from his home, sent into Siberia, or consigned to a dungeon, or ordered to execution, without even the form of anything worth being called a trial. What is the reason of the difference between the United States and Russia? Russia is a despotism; the United States is a democracy. In the United States, if there are any grievances, the people are free to discuss them in the papers; they are free to assemble to take counsel with one another in respect to measures for their correction; they are free to elect representatives to Congress who have power to correct these grievances. In Russia, there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of assemblage; there is no political body answering to the Anglo-Saxon House of Representatives or House of Commons. The people are absolutely without any protection whatever from the absolute decree of the Czar and of the subordinate officers who act in his name. Hence the Nihilists. We do not defend, nor exculpate, nor excuse this organization; we simply endeavor to account for it. It is a secret society, whose members are bound together by the most horrible oaths, indorsed by the most solemn sanctions. They pledge themselves to execute any decree of the central authority, though it may involve assassination, and though it may be perpetrated at the hazard of their own lives. This society extends throughout all Russia, and includes people of every caste and class. It is strongest in the higher class, and has representatives among the princes of the Imperial household, and among the nobility. Its strongholds are the colleges. It is not the child of ignorance nor of poverty. Where such an organization exists, there must be some secret reason for it. In Russia, the secret reason for its existence is the fact that it is the only mode of protection possible to a people absolutely without liberty. Thus far it has proved itself powerful; it has brought the police of the great cities under its terror; it warns every police magistrate that he proceeds in the execution of the Bureaucratic decrees at the peril of his own life. The magistrate who sends an accused person to Siberia without adequate cause, has reason to tremble for his own trial before the secret tribunal, his secret condemnation, and his own sudden and unexpected execution. Already one chief of the secret police has been driven from power, a second killed, and a third shot at and wounded. The police themselves, if not connected with Nihilistic societies—and it is charged that more than half of them are—are paralyzed by terror, and their inefficiency is the excuse for the Czar’s proclamation of martial law. Suspicion spares no one, not even the heir to the throne. The moment that such a society becomes powerful it becomes terrible, and the repressive measures which have been taken in Russia are themselves a demonstration that the Nihilists are powerful. The weakness of Nihilism consists not merely in its criminal methods, but even more in the fact that it formulates no definite demands for reform. Americans do not need to be stimulated to guard their own interests; but we do need sometimes to remind ourselves what freedom really means to us. Recently a boy in a Russian college wrote to his father that he was being urgently pressed to join the Nihilists. He implored his father to hasten to the school and take him home, as he feared for his life. The father did hasten to the school, to find the threats of the Nihilists already executed, and to carry home to burial the corpse of his son. What consideration would make any reader of the Christian Union willing to exchange the inconveniences and discomforts of American political life, of frequent elections and bitter partisan strife, of a too truculent and sometimes pernicious press, for a state of civilization in which such an incident as this would be possible?—Christian Union.