South Canterbury Times, TUESDAY, MARCH, 15, 1881.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2491, 15 March 1881, Page 2

South Canterbury Times, TUESDAY, MARCH, 15, 1881.

The Emperor of Russia is dead! Killed by a bomb in the midst of bis soldiers, at a military review, in the capital of his empire ! A life which seemed to be charmed has disappeared into the outer darkness at the moment when it seemed most secure ! History contains no parallel. Kings and Emperors have fallen at the hands of traitors and assassins, in the vicinity of their own courts, even in their own bedchambers, but an Emperor falling mortally wounded while witnessing a review of his own troops is an incident that has never been approached in the annals of regicides. Yet the autocrat of all the Russias, the head of the Russian Church, the man who claimed kinship with the Divinity, has fallen

in the midst of the wall of fire that he fanned'into life for his personal safety !' Shattered in limb and body, surrounded by surgeons eager to staunch the lifestream, the blood of an Emperor, who for more than a quarter of a century has ruled over millions of human beings, has c-bbed away ! For years past disaffection has been growing and spreading all over bis vast empire ; secret organisations have been at work; deadly malice, an insatiable desire for revenge, has dogged his footsteps. All his wealth—he was the richest sovereign in Europe—all his power, divine and temporal, availed him nothing. For fifteen years he has run the gaunlct of the Nihilists, pursued with a hatred, keen and implacable ; for fifteen years his life has been pertinaceouly assailed till it seemed as if providence had taken him under her special care. But the threatened catastrophe has occurred at last; the thousands of secret conspirators who panted for his life night and day, have, as the result of their unwearied plotting, achieved their design. The man who weilded the destinies of armies and industrial communities, who ruled Church and State with a rod of iron, at whose breath the conscription was brought into operation, armies were drafted together, and gaps made by carnage shed sorrow on thousands of families, is now numbered with the meanest of the butchered ones who fell on the field of conquest. The citizen’s life was sacrificed in accordance with the mandate of his sovereign; and now the slayer is slain ! Power is humiliated in the dust! Peace to the ashes of the great departed! The imperial sun has descended on a red horison ; let us hope that it foretells a sunny day for Russia, By a singular concidcncc Alexander 11. has fallen within a few days of the eightieth anniversary of the assassination of his grandfather—the Emperor Paul. That tragic event occurred about the dawn of the present century, and the Russian empire since that period has passed through a variety of vicissitudes. Under the sway of despots and autocrats of the sternest character, the people have rapidly been making headway. The abolition of personal slavery has been followed by the emancipation of millions of serfs, the spread cf education, immense commercial and industrial development, and the gradual concentration of popular power. The tree of liberty planted on Russian soil has been growing in spite of the pruning knife of the despot, and, under the Emperor who has just passed away, its growth has been prodigious. The career of the deceased Emperor has been that of a strict disciplinarian. Avowedly a liberator, the friend of the peasant, he at the same time steadily adhered to the maxims and policy of his father, who declared “ Despotism is the very essence of my Government.” As the result of a twenty-six years’ reign ho has loft Russia strengthened by conquest but weakened by internal feuds. He has been the living embodiment of an exploded principle,— the unity of church and state. Essentially a soldier, he was the soul of order and legitimacy: a popular liberator, he filled the Siberian mines with slaves and rioted on the wealth purchased with the lives of his subjects ; ostentatiously pious, he prosecuted every sect but the one over which he claimed to be high priest. His public life has been marked by striking contrasts —bright gleams of liberty shining through a dark background of absolute tyranny. He had to deal with a people used to despotism. When he untied their hands—when on March 2, 18(51, he emancipated twenty-three millions of serfs—he little apprehended the personal risk he ran. He knew not that every taste of liberty would whet the appetite for more, —that the populace, now free, would crave for greater measures of freedom. Yet what do we find ? The very hands whose chains were unrivetted twenty years ago have turned round on their liberator and he has died the inglorious death of Rizzio. The career of the late emperor may be briefly summarised:—Bom in 1818, he was 03 years of age at the time of his death. On the death of Nicholas 111. on March 2, 1855, he was proclaimed Emperor. His first step was to proclaim his intention of carrying out his father’s policy and prosecuting the Russian war, but in six months Sebastopol fell, the Emperor threw up the sponge, and embraced France and England, Next we find him abolishing serfdom with the full consent of his nobles ; applying himself to the administration of an internal policy ; developing arts and manufactures ; trying his hand at the establishment of a spurious kind of local Government ; then falling back upon a policy of invasion and conquest, sending out generals in various directions, plunging the country into a war with Turkey ; and finally spending the last years of his life in trying to patch together a reputation in ruins, and to shield from the assassin a miserable, insecure existence.

The Emperor is dead, but the cry o i “ Long live the Emperor !” has not been heard. We have seen the tragedy, what will be the sequel ? All Europe, we may believe, is thrilled with expectation. Crowned heads, aspiring princes, ambitious ministers, purse-proud nobles will sleep uneasily, for the fire of revolt, the flames of revolution, may burst out at any moment. The death of the Emperor may be but the cartridge that explodes the dynamite. The revolution is not confined to Russia, it is travelling like an earthquake all over Europe. Where and how will it end ? When the fire is quenched, when the smoke clears away, let us hope the result will be to purify the social and political fabric, to make the world better than ever it was before, to wash the blood-stained patches from the sceptre, and to establish on a firm and reliable basis the rights and liberty of mankind.

It is to hoped that pending a reorganised Fire Brigade in Timaru there will be no occasion to ring the fire bell. TJie volunteer brigadiers have suddenly disbanded, and the town at this moment is at the mercy of the flames should anyone think it worth his while to realise on his insurance policy. The outlook is a had one for the Insurance Companies and it is equally serious for the uninsured. It seems a pity that any misunderstanding should have arisen between the Brigade and their patrons—the Borough Council. Still greater is the pity that the bone of contention should be so trivial. Possibly there may be something beneath the firemen’s boots, but leather is the only superficial grievance. Had the members of both bodies remembered the advice that the bootmaker received and £ * stuck to their lasts ” they might both be in working order. They have collided like vessels at sea and one of them has gone down. The loss of the firemen is a public loss, and it is to be regretted that the Timaru Corporation should have contributed to it. A due sense of their civic responsibility should have induced them to have avoided a disastrous collision. It is questionable how far the Council has been justified in taking the firemen at their word and leaving the town without the slightest protection in case of fire. Leaving the merits of the dispute out of the question, the Council has acted with more haste than discretion. If the Brigade did not come up to their standard of excellence, the the Council should not have withheld their shoe-leather. The fireman, we understand, have had a standing grievance. Although their services have been generously acknowledged from time to time by the public, they complain that from the Borough Council they have received the scurviest treatment. It has only been by dint of pertinacious begging that they have been able to keep themselves respectable. Had they not pestered the Council from time to time they would have been travelling in rags instead of uniform with their toes out, at the sacrifice of all decency and manly dignity. If the Council wished to see the Brigade in a state of improved efficiency they should not have trifled with their obligations or treated the members as mendicants. Their first duty, before condemning this bodyj was to remove any just grievance that might exist. As it is, the Council has rushed at the Brigade like a bull at a china-shop, and they have done a great deal of damage which it is to be feared they will hardly repair, for after the treatment that the present firemen, have received, there will probably be some reluctance on the part of recruits about accepting any bait—whether money or shoe leather—that the municipal fathers may think proper to dangle.