RUSSIA.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3691, 23 October 1880, Page 4

RUSSIA.

The Times, speaking of Russia, says: —"When a Sovereign, as did the Emperor Alexander on the 24th of February»treats his people in the manner of a nurse petting a, misbehaving child in the corner, both rulers and nation withdraw for the time from the society of their equals. Nihilist outrages justified, or, at any rate, excused, the creation last spring of the Supreme Executive, under the presidency, of Count Loris Melikoff. A set of human wild beasts appeared to bare been let loose in that vast empire. They were wild beasts in their utter privation of moral control, worse than wild beats in' the coldblooded guidance of their plots by the brains of men. The, nation at large did not combine with them but it did not resist and countermine; it looked on apathetically, if not sympathetically, unconscious that any duty lay upon it even to protest. The more necessary, however, may have been the extraordinary powers of the Commission of Febnary to combat sedition and to maintain' social order, the more complete was the abdication by Russia during the dictatorship of its rank among nations. The people was adjudged by its chiefs incompetent to guard its own moral being! By the same measure the Czar condemned his own appointed Ministers. If what he styles in bis Ukase of the 18th of August an unification of authorities was required, itVas that Chancellors and Ministers of the Interior, and heads of the Police, and commandants of gendarmes, and Governors of cities and provinces, had all been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Not himself and his own autocracy were excluded from the universal stigma of inadequacy and failure. From the Czar all powers emanate. Back to him they all flow. For the past six months the Emperor has put as it were his Imperial crown from off his head, and has given it and himself into the keeping of his wise and loyal General."