New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 1877.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5031, 9 May 1877, Page 2

New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 1877.

According to our earliest telegrams the Turks got " first blood " in encountering the Russians on the Asiatic frontier. At Batum the troops of the Tsar were defeated, ;with a loss of 800 men. It will now bo seen that they havo been twice repnlsed at Kars, suffering heavy loss, and being compelled to fall back. This intelligence would seom to argue that. Kars had not as yet been formally invested or threatoncd with a regular siego. Tho repulses mentioned took place doubtless under the forts and walls of the city, and were more of tho nature of battles than of absolute attacks upon troops sheltered by ramparts. Tho statement that the Russians had fallen back shows that in these battles they got so decidedly the worst of tho combat that they had to execute a retrograde movement towards tho frontier. But of .course the fighting up to the present cannot be taken as giving any reliablo indication of the side to which ultimato victory will incline. That tho Turks can fight to the last has been proved before now; that the Russians mean to fight it out now thoro can be little doubt. Mr. Mackenzie Wallace, who from residence and inquiry understands Russia and the Russians thoroughly, has recently published a work which has been unreservedly accepted in England as an absolute text-book upon the great Western Empire, its Government, and its people. The Spectator, in an article headed " Why Russia will Fight," quotes largely from Mr. Wallace's ■work, and, indeed, founds its conclusions altogether on the statements made by that author in his account of the effects on Russia of the defeat sustained in the Crimea. The whole article is in the present conjunction so well worth reading, that no excuse is needed for quoting from it :—All Russia was at that time in the grasp of ultra-Tory administrators. The Emperor Nicholas had succeeded during his reign in making repression complete, till when the Crimean war broke out he wa3, perhaps, more absolutely master than any monarch had over been. There wa3 not only no resistance to his will anyI where, but apparently no wish to resist, ! the majority even of educated Russians being tonvinced that the autocracy, with all its oppressivenesss, suited their country's needs. "In a nation accustomed to political life, and to a certain amount of self-government, any approach to the system of Nicholas would, of course, havo produced widespread dissatisfaction and violent hatred against the ruling power. But in Russia, at that time,° no such feelings were awakened. The educated classes —and a fortiori the uneducated were profoundly indifferent, not only to political questions, but also to ordinary public affairs, whether local or Imperial, and were quite content to leave them in the hands of those who were paid for attending to them. In common with the uneducated peasantry, the nobles had a boundless respect—ono might almost say a superstitious reverence—not only for the person, but also for the will of tho Tsar, and were ready to show unquestioning obedience to his commands, so long as these did not interfere with their accustomed mode of life." The Crimean war was as popular as a crusade, and there was nothing in its conclusion to humiliate a reasonable national pride. Russia was defeated at last by three great Powers, England, Prance, and Austria—for it was the intervention of Austria in 1856 which made further resistance hopeless—and any State in the world might have yielded with dignity before such a combination. Nevertheless, the nation was profoundly moved. Its dream of equality with the West was rudely dissipated for ever. There are no party hatreds in Russia, all parties and classes being crushed too equally, and the wrath of the nation fell therefore with unbroken violence upon the Imperial system. The entire people awoke to a perception that the terrible sacrifices they had made had been useless ; that their organisation, the object of such rigorous tyranny, was worthless ; that their very army was weak, that tho autocratic system had not made them masters abroad. Frightful pasquinades, in which the Tsars were called on to come down from their thrones, circulated in manuscript in St. Petersburg. The officials were so cowed by the storm of national scorn, that they with one accord proclaimed themselves Liberals. Tho Liberal tyranny became for a time as despotic as the Conservative. " Those who had formerly paraded their ' tchin' (official rank) on Ml occasions, in season and out of season, became half ashamed to admit that they had tho rank of General, for the title no longer commanded respect, and had become associated with all that was antiquated, formal, and stupid. Among the young generation it was used most disrespectfully as equivalent to ' pompous|blockhead.' Zealous officials, who had lately regarded the acquisition of Stars and Orders as among the chief ends of man, were fain to conceal those hard-won trophies, lest some cynical 'Liberal' might notice them, and make them the butt of his satire. ' Look at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought tho country'—such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in their ears—' with your red tapo, your Chinese formalism, and your principle of lifeless, unreasoning, mechanical obedience! You asserted constantly that you woro the only true patriots, and branded with tho name of traitor those who warned you of the insane folly of your conduct. "You see now what it has all came to.' " So universal was tho feeling, that had not Alexander 11., partly from sympathy and partly from policy, headed the movement, and commenced immense reforms, ending in emancipation, there can be hardly a doubt that tho Russian people, which always advances or recedes in great leaps and bounds, would have radically changed the organism of their Government. The very throne rocked, and but that Alexander, by his "wholly unexpected" decision and energy in the matter of emancipation, re-cemented his authority over the masses and broke the power of the noblesse, the autocracy to which with all his mildness ho is devoted, might havo crumbled before tho public indignation. Explosions of feeling in Russia are always dangerous. The oneness of the people, their completo fusion beneath the terrible sway of tho Tsars, their surfaco impulsiveness, and their extreme tenacity upon a, few subjects, give to their movements enormous momentum, and tho whole history of Russia is aseriesof violent rushes, followed by long periods of reactionary tranquility. It is one of these rushes which would follow a retreat of Russia from before Turkey. Mild by comparison as tho government of Tsar Alexander has boen, it iB still repressive enough to mako Russians long for an equivalent in the grandeur of Russia among the nations of the earth. Freedom is still ontiroly unknown; men suspected of "bad inten-

tions" still disappear suddenly from their usual haunts, either to be confined in prison or deported ; taxation is still exceedingly heavy; whole masses of discontent, produced by the method of emancipation, are still fermenting ; the army is still the most formidable power in the State, and its leaders the most potent personages. A grand humiliation f-.dt peculiarly by the army would end in another explosion of rage, and this time tho institution of serfago could not be made to bear all the blame. "What; our army, which absorbs our taxe3 and our children, and daily dominates over us, nnable oven to meet Turks, —then the autocracy does not even mako us strong." The cities would be full of libels. The officials would be full of the dread which tells so heavily in Russia —the dread of being thought barbarians, and denounced by all among whom they live. The army would be full of discontents. The active revolutionists, though they havo no longer emancipation to offer, have still much to propose to the soldiery, and much to complain of, as in 1856, in the astounding expenditure of tho Imperial House; and Russia, quiet as her internal history appears to Englishmen, has known of terrible military mutinies. The Romanoffs have reason to dread Russian explosions, even if they did not fool that secret dread of Pushkin's menace, " the knife hath an edge, and the scarf hath a fold," which never quits any man, be he Roman Crosar, or Russian Tsar, or Paraguayan Dictator, who has once ascended to the position where the horror of isolation, of the cruel loneliness which all autocrats feel, has been borno full upon his mind. No Tsar of Russia however steady-minded, no Government of Russia however successful, will ever risk a true national movement against autocracy, oven if the dangers of yielding to the popular policy should seem interminable. They feel, in face of that danger, as tho much stronger Government of India feels about universal peasantrevolt, —that no danger can be so vast, so multiform, or so terrible. There are occurrences no Government will risk—the English Government, for example, would do anything rather than create an insurrection in London—and tho dreaded occurrence in Russia is a burst of humiliated rage, such as must follow a retreat before the most hated and most despised of traditionary foes, tho Turk, who affronts the religious feeling of the peasants, the political feeling of the educated, and the humanitarian feeling of the upper classes. "For," says Mr. Mackenzie Wallace, perhaps the Englishman who best know 3 Russia, "strange as it may seem to those who cling to the old traditional conception of the Russian noble, I must say that I know no body of men who are more sensitive to humanitarian conceptions than tho Russian educated classes. Their humanitarianism does not, perhaps, stand very well the wear and tear of everyday life, and is apt after a time to evaporate to a certain extent; but while it lasts it is very strong, and can drive them to make considerable sacrifices."