THE UNFORTUNATE CZAR.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 42, 18 February 1905, Page 9

THE UNFORTUNATE CZAR.

• X the "New York World Sunday Magazine" Mr. *^\lll!// : \ w ' T -" stead has n - f V-Sli/ ) luniinating article upon *^ c conditiGns of the life of Czar Niellolas IL of Rassia, -which indicate bow little the great antocrat of one of the greatest empires which the world has seen is to be enried by the humblest private individual. The present Czar, says }£r. Stead, is a man full of contradictions. He is the sworn champion of universal peace, and yet he wages a sanguinary Trar. He is one of the most humanitarian of men, yet he is trampling on Finland, and his Ministers, with his approval, or at len.st without his interference, are oppressing Armenians, Jews, and nearly all the

other rapes within his dominions. What can we make of him? Nothing can ever make mc believe that the genial, kindly, sympathetic man who received mc at Livadia and at Tsarskoye Selo has the instincts of a despot. That he is a good-hearted man. who wishes sincerely to do right. I have no more doubt than [ have of my own existence. That he is an intelligent and well-informed man I know from personal conversation. I interviewed his father, I have met most of the leading people of the world, and I have met. few who were more keenly alive than Nicholas 11. to the event 3 of their time, or better informed about men and affairs. It is not information that is lacking, nor good-will, nor a

i'kindly sympathy with, human suffering. That "he "is a, charming and sympathetic human beiHg. a man of ail the domestic virtues, devoted to Ms wife, and never : so happy as -when he is with his children, everyone knows who has been privileged to meet him in his own home. And 1 yet it is impossible to deny the fact j that his reign has been characterised by acts of impolicy and of repression which to the outsider seem to be as I lunatic irom the point of view of the ! statesman as they are indefensible from 'that of the moralist? What is the explanation of this paradox? The explana- ] i tion is probably to be songht in the i hopeless incongruity that exists be- ! tv?een the man and the situation. He ! would do good, but the evil is present j -with him. The phenomenon is not so j unfamiliar as to be incomprehensible. I The Czar is in the position occupied by every Liberal British Minister who resorts to coercion in Ireland. He has nofc the saving grace of liberty to save him from perdition. He has to do the things he hates, and pursue a policy most repugnant to his temperament, so he stumbles ou from "uad to worse. He is a humane man charged ■with the administration of an inhuman system. He is a.v honest man at the head of a vast bureaucracy honeycombed with corrup- , tion. He is an intelligent man. who is the Sovereign of an Empire steeped in ignorance. To crown everytnin;? else, he is a religious man, ■who is profoundly convinced that the domination assumed by the European over the Asiatic is harmful to both, and yet he is waging a war which can be justified only on the theory that that domination is just and beneficial. Never was there any man in so false a position. He is a crowned Hamlet. The time is out of Joint: O. cursed ejiite, That ever I was born to set it right! The natural result follows. He does not put it right. He made a- heroic pffort to stem the mill-stream of militarism, and the results of The Hague Conference stand to hi.s crodit, against all the errors and crimes of his internal administration. But in internal affairs he has failed to impress anyone with a conviction that he has in him the capacity for heroic resolution. That J which tells asrainst him worse in the j general estimation is his deplorable aej quiescence in the policy of repression in j Finland. Xo one saw more clearly than the Czar the folly of that fatal d?parture from the long-establishpd j policy of his dynasty. Yet he could not nerve himself to reverse it. And as it I was in Finland, so it has been elseI where. This modern man, with his head full of kindly sympathy, "has permitted himself to be dragged alonij the droary road of repression and retrogression. If

he had m him the demoniac enersrv of : Peter the Great, or even the resolute courage of the Mikado, he might have averted many of the worst evils which are overtaking him. But he was not built on these lines. His innate modesty, and the painful sense of being altogether out of his element in administering a system with which he was out of harmony, held him back from taking the steps which, his own inclination prompted. It, is deplorable. The Czar maydo badly, but who is there among the Grand Dukes who would not be im--1 measurably -worse? Kever can I forset jthe pathetic earnestness with which the i

Czar replied to some observation of mine as to the difficulty which he myst experience, lie being a modern man in the midst of rncdiaevalism: "Difficult? Xo one knows how difficult! I would not inflict my position upon my worst enemy." It may be said that if the Czar feels this so keenly why does he not abdicate? Russians, however, like Britons, have a constitutional horror of running away. The Czar may feel that he is in a hopeless position, but the idea of deserting his post never crosses his mind. He is not a Hercules, either

physically or in±ellecfcTialry r Eren a Hercules might Taint appalled front the task of cleansing the Augean, stables of the Russian administration. A writer in the "Outlook" gives this pen-portrait of the Czar: In a bearded face a shifted eye — you have the man. Not. mark you, a shifty eye, for the Czar will look elsewhere steadily, so it be not into your eyes. Thus we gather before he speaks that he is a man of good intentions, and wrath with him becomes 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 vice-regent he believes himself to be. 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. Our souls are a trifle chilled at the thought of his own self-reproach.