Our Contributors.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume V, Issue 505, 17 May 1881, Page 3

Our Contributors.

OUR PARIS LETTER.

[prom our own correspondent.]!

Paris, March 24 The deed of the 13th March will leave another streak in the history of Russia. Although Comte Melikoff had all the millions he des:red, and increased the number of secret police from 600 to 3,000, he could not turn aside the fatality that the Czar was to be destroyed in the streei of his capital, and by ordinary citizens. Were he murdered in his palace, and by bis nobles, the event might be viewed as less tragical. Zola, who claims to be an authority on Russia, would perhaps find the latter natural ; he has just announced that the future of all the Russians will be Naturalism or Nothing. The first process has not yet been tried, and the second is now an old nost'um. Alexander 111. is not yet felt to be sufficiently free to state his intentions, or rather give evidence of them by acts. The proclamation and circular not s are viewed as but jnere formalities. He cannot walk in the footsteps of his father. He must abolish the restrictive laws; accord civil and religious independence ; guarantee the personal security of his subjects, and obtain order in the finances of the state. He must take up the work of reform where Alexander 11., in a scare, left off; re-examine that white-elephant present to the serfs, the?r emancipation, give them sufficient land on which to live, and abolish rack payments in the form of ta:ces, and onerous instalments for price of proprietorship. Solomon was a wise man and Sampson a strong one, but both together could not pay, if they had not the money. The Russian nobility so far resemble the French aristocracy before 1789—they are exempted from beting the fiscal burdens of the State. Not that the Russians demand a republic ; that's a cure of which they have no conception, and show their good sense by never adopting it as a plank in in their platform. When education j shall have done its work, the people will be duly sovereign. In any case, Russia may be expected to be the last to join Hugo's poetic United States of Eurupc. There !'re 15 millions of dissenters in Holy Russia, out-lawcd, tracked by the police, and pi;iii.;hcu as criminal;.. They j.re actually in the same position as the Hvifuenofe uftc" , the revolution of the edict of Niiutcs. The defunct Czar

emancipated the serfs ; the present ruler can emancipate consciences, aud cease to impose his doxy—his official God, one and indivisible. The maintenance of a million of soldiers fully explains why so many millions of peasants are. starving. Until the political surgeons attack these gangrenes, their prescriptions of Siberia, the rack with electric appliances, and the gibbet, will have for contre-coup, palace explosions, street mines, nitroglycerine bombs, and the intellectual chaos which seethes in an empire situated between the old world and the new. People despite , the horrible cause, smile at the deceased Czar being provided in his coffin with a wooden log ; the feet is, that his lower extremities were shivered into atoms, the pariicles of flesh and bone being kept together merely by his clothing, and as he has a uniform instead of winding sheets, and had to be exposed to view, it was necessary to arrange the body accordingly. His boots and flesh were literally pounded into a pulp; the left foot, hanging- by a tendon, was turned frontwards : his gloves had fo be cut off bit by bit; his abdominal wound recalled the Jap--1 anese happy despatch. So mutilated, it is unnecessary .to add all the. reports as to his last words are so many myths. When he arrived at the palace thsre was not a pint of blood in his body, so that tha doctors were not wroni? in deciding that transfusing blood into the veins of a dead man was useless, The piece of carpet on which the body w;ts laid to be surgically examined has been secured by the Princess Voronzoff for a family relic. At the moment of the assassination the Czar's morganatic wife, the Princess Jurierska (ne'e Dolgorouki) was visiting her sister. She at once rushed back to the palace, aided the doctors to lay bare the wounds, and so continued till the new Emperor entered, when she retired—and permanently. The truth about the people is, they display neither coldness nor indifference, but a something like calm, of nilchevo, to employ the untranslateable Russian phrase. Yet they ought to be satisfied, for Alexander 11. fell, as Trajan said all Emperors ought to do, standing. He was not at nil popular since his liason with La Dolgorouki. The Father and the Pope of his people ought not to have descended to the vice of having a mistress, ns if he were a Louis XIV. The new Empress will take care that in this respect, nt least, Alexander 111. will not follow in his father's footsteps. More than Russians count upon her efforts to obtain the reforms the Empire stands in need of. As she rules the heart of the Emperor, she thus holds in her hands the destinies of eighty millions of her fellow-eroaonres. With the exception of rather thick lips, she is beautiful. But is not the Ba'tic the home of the northern Sirens ? Daughter of the " King of the Sea," she has ■ courage, and she inherits from her mother charity, homely shrewdness, and proverbinl tnct. She and her husband are, in addition, comrades ; both like study, and, above all, music ; she rides like an Amazon, and on review days accompnnies him dressed as a Cossack colonel—something as an aide de-camp. She is surrounded by sage advisers. In her boudoir are all the souvenirs of her youthful days ; some of her toys served to amuse her own children. Being the moiety of her husband, she must ever be prepared to share his dangers, and equally interested in averting them. Yesterday she was sheltered by the ihrone ; to-day she has ever to meditate on the aphorism of Joseph de Maistre, " Russia is &i\ autocracy, tempered by assassinati n."