OVA PARIS LETTER.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3854, 6 May 1881, Page 3

OVA PARIS LETTER.

(FROM OUB OWN CORRESPONDENTS.) Paris, March 24 The deed of the 13th March will leave another streak in the history of .Russia. Although Count Melikoff had all the millions he desired, and increased the number of secret police from 600 to 3,000, he could not turn aside the fatality, that the Czar was to be destroyed in his own capital and by ordinary citizens. Were lie murdered in his palace, and by- his nobles, the,event might be viewed as less tragical. Teolai, who claims to be an authority on Russia, would perhaps find the latter event natural. He has just announced that the future of all the Knssias will be Naturalism or nothing. - The first process has not yet been tried, and the secoud is now an old nostrum. Alexander 111. is not yet felt to be sufficiently free to state bis intensions, or rather give evidence of them by acts. The proclamation and circular note arc fiewed as but mere formalities; he cannot walk in the footsteps of his father. He must abolish the restrictive laws, accord civil and'religious independence, guarantee the personal security of his subjects and obtain order in the finances of the state. He must take up the work of reform where Alexander. 11., in a scare, left off; re-examine that white elephant present to the serfs—their emancipation, give them sufficient land on which to live, and abolish rack payments in the form of taxes, and onerous instalments for price of proprietorship. : Solomon was a wise man, and Sampson a strong one, but both together could not pay if they had not if they had not the money. The Ens* sian nobility so far resemble the French aristocracy before 1379. They are exempted from bearing the fiscal burdens of the State. Not that the Russians demand a Republic; that's a cure.of which they hare no conception, and show their good ■ense by never adopting it as a plank in their platform. When education shall hare done its work the people will be duly sovereign. In any case Russia may be expected to be the last to join Hugo's poetic United States of Europe. There are fifteen millions of dissenters iv Holy Russia;,outlawed, tracked by the police, and punished as criminals. They are actually in .the. same position as the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict.of: Nantes * The defunct Czar emancipated the serfs ; the present ruler can emancipate consciences,* and cease to impose his doxy—his official god, one and indivisible. The maintenance of a million of soldiers fully explains why so many millions of peasants are starving. Until the political surgeons attack these gangrenes, their prescriptions of Siberia, the rack with electric appliances, and the gibbet, will have for contre coup, palace explosions, street mines, nitroglycerine bombs, and the intellectual chaos which teethes, in an empire situated between the old world and the new. People, despite the horrible cause, smile at (he deceased Czar being provided in his coffin with a wooden leg. The fact is that his lower extremities were shivered into atoms, the particles of flesh and bone being kept together merely by his clothing, and as he has a uniform instead of winding sheets, and had to be exposed to view, it was necessary to arrange the body accordingly. His boots and flesh were literally pounded into a pulp; the left foot hanging by a tendon, was turned heel frontwards ; his gloves had to be cut off bit by bit; his abdominal wound recalled the Japanese happy despatch. So mutilated, it is unnecessary to add, all the reports as to his last words are so many myths. When he arrived at the palace there;was not a pint of blood in bis body, so the doctors were not wrong in deciding that transfusing blood into the veins of a dead man was useless. The piece of carpet on which the body was laid to be surgically examined has been secured by the Princess Vorouzoff, for a family relic. At the moment of the assassination the Czar's Morganatic wife, the Princess Jurierska (nee Dolgorouki) was visiting . her sister; she at once rushed back to the palace, aided the doctors to lay bare the wounds, and so continued, till the new Emperor entered, when she retired—and permanently. The truth about the people is they display neither coldnes, nor indifference, but a something like calm, of nitchevo, to employ the untranslatable Russian phrase. Yet they ought to be satisfied, for Alexander II fell as Trojan said all Emperors ought-to do^— standing. He whs not at all popular since his liaison with la Dolgorouki ; the Father and the Pope of his people, ought not to have descended to the ri&Tfif having a mistress, as if he were a Louis XIV. The new Empress will take care that in this respect at least Alexander 111 will not foliow in his father's footsteps. More than Russians- count upon her efforts to obtain the reforms the Empire stands in need of. As she rules the heart of the Emperor, she thus holds in her hands the destinies of 80 millions of her fellow creatures, with the exception of rather thick lips, she is beautiful. But is not the Baltic the home of the northern sirens? Daughter of "the King of the Sea,"—she has courage, and she inherits from her mother charity, homely shrewdness and proverbial tact. She and her husband are in addition ijomrades, both like study, and above all music; she rides like an Amazon, and on review days accompanies him dressed as a Cossack colonel—something as an aidede camp. She is sur--rounded by sage advisers. In her boudoir are all the souvenirs of her youthful days;' some of her toys served to amuse rher own children. Being the moiety of her husband, she must ever be prepared to share his dangers, and equally interested in averting them. Yesterday she was sheltered by the throne, today she has ever to meditate the aphorism of Joseph de Maistre, "Russia is an autocnojf tempered by assassination.