NICHOLAS THE SECOND.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 33, 8 February 1905, Page 3

NICHOLAS THE SECOND.

■ -■"« In a bearded face a shifted eye—yo* have the man. Not, mark you, a shift}; eye, for the Czar will 100 kelsewhem steadily, so it be not into your eyes. I_iu_l we gather (says 'Tacitus" in "Tho Out* look") before he speaks that he is a man of good intentions, and wrath with tinbecomes meaningless. Few of us, plain men with no power to misuse, can understand the utter misery of the soul of this man within whose Imperial circlet the cleft golden cap symbolises, through days of weakness and hours of indecision, the cloven tongues of that Spirit Whose human interpreter and vicegerent he believes himself to be. For His sake let us deal with. this man with a vast pity, not hardly noi; in anger. This is the man who . DREAMED AND INITIATED the noblest scheme of peace and goodwill among men that graces the record of Christianity—dreamed and initiated, and fell away. The Czar always falls away, and knows his shame as he falls. How pitiful then is spite; nay, before the tiny tempests of ineffectual rage which rock thi_. iittle soul goes out in full the sympathy ol the great nation which from time to time he designs uncertainly to harm. Glad and relieved we are to turn away from then! to the virile and splendid hatred of William 11. Here, whatever his faults, is a man among men, a true swordsman, with his eye upon your pupil, and we respect him however hard he shall have hit at as. But this wayward man of Petersburg ire can-! not please, try we never so hari far tflt the weak courtesy must needs seem condiscussion, and our nature is not ex* quisite in these affairs. Who is the art-tee. of the j SECOND GREATEST EMPIRE OP IBS WORLD to-day? He who has last closed the dooe of the little room in wblchthe successor o_ Ivan the Terrible sits with twitching fingers and a revolver in the half opened drawer before him. (There was a man, Rhodes once who went out unarmed to ths Matoppo Hills,-and won a great kingdom; but example and precept are alike useless here.) Has Alexander just conveyed to Mat august kinsman the latest dete_z__tkka, of the Grand Ducal Com__i_te.—ha sketches ont that letter of dismissal' to Lamsdorfl! which the poor soul knows a 0 he writes will never be sent. Or has Ms sole attendant left on his table a declp__a>ed telegram from Berlin—he drafts a fac-ing-both-ways commission to Kirropatkm, which he must needs keep f rem Alexis's eye. Has Father John strode out with th# Orthodox blessing still crimping his fl»----sers—the red stain of dead poor fishermen warms his dun so_l with the terror oC hellflre, till Philippe, even then avoiding". John's grey eye in the corridor, shall comfort him, for tbe rapping tahel and the moving board play now with this Autocrat! as plays the wind with aa October leaf. This is no man upon whose \$ BURDEN OF S__M»2«____M. ' to lay an added straw. We have no <jn*r-r rel with him, only an infinite comjUß—Qfl_ We do not understand the Czar, we do not judge. Those of us who thank heaven we do not understand are silly Pharisees; there is the Finger of God laid openly upon this unhappy man, and onr heads bow before its manifestation. Except in dire necessity, we could no more oppose hla way than we could thrust into the gutter the blind piper outside Devonshire House. But onr souls are a trifle chilled at the thought of his own self-reproach. TomUnson in the imperial purple of All the Rnasias. O the pity of it. O the pity of It