Fourthly, To make choice of two hundred of the richest men in England in estate that be not noblemen, and make them titular, as it is used in Naples, and paying for it; that is, a Duke thirty thousand pounds, a Marquis fifteen thousand pounds, an Earl ten thousand pounds, a Baron or Viscount five thousand pounds.

It is to be understood, that ancient Nobility of Barons and Earls are to preceed these as Peers, though these be made Marquisses or Dukes. This may raise a million of pounds, and more to your Majesty. To make Gentlemen of low quality, and franklins, or rich farmers, Esquires, to preceed them, would yield your Majesty also a great sum of money in present.

I know another course to yield your Majesty three hundred thousand pounds in money, which as yet the time serveth not to deliver, until your Majesty be resolved to proceed in some of the former courses; which till then I omit.

Other courses also that may make present money, I shall study for your Majesty's service; and as I shall find them out, acquaint you withal.

Lastly, To conclude all these discourses, by the application of this course used for your profit, that is not only the means to make you the richest King that ever England had, but also your safety augmented thereby to be most secure; besides what is shewed in the first part of this discourse, I mean by the occasion of the taxation, and raising of monies, your Majesty shall have cause and means to employ, in all places of the land, so many officers and ministers to be obliged to you for their own profit and interest, as nothing can be attempted against your person and Royal state over the land, but some of these shall in all probability have means to find it out and hinder it. Besides, this course will repress many disorders and abuses in the public government, which were hard to be discovered by men indifferent.

To prohibit gorgeous and costly apparel to be worn but by persons of good quality, shall save the Gentry of the kingdom much more money than they shall be taxed to pay your Majesty.

Thus withal I humbly take my leave, and kiss your gracious hands, desiring pardon for any errors I may commit herein.

[The preceding admirable paper by that ablest of the tools of tyranuy-Lord Strafford -is taken from the Appendix to Ludlow's Memoirs. It is reprinted here-1, because it is very little known; 2, because it is worth while recalling, from time to time, what are the ordinary and extraordinary means of tyrants; and 3, because it is not even in this nineteenth century too late to repeat the tyrannical experiments of two hundred years ago. E. ER.]

THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE AND THEIR SOCIALISM.

A LETTER TO J. MICHELET BY ALEXANDER HERZEN.

SIR! You stand too high in public estimation, your words being welcomed by the Democracy of Europe with that unlimited confidence which your noble pen has so justly gained you, for me to be permitted, in a matter that touches my deepest convictions, to leave unanswered the characterization of the Russian people made by you in your excellent work on Kosciusko.b

This answer is so much the more indispensable, that it is time to let Europe see that in speaking now of Russia it no longer speaks of one absent, distant, or dumb.

We are present, we who have quitted our country in the sole hope of making a free Russian word resound in Europe. Speech becomes our duty when a man, who is upheld by a great and legitimate authority, happens to say to us that 'he asserts, he swears, he will prove, that Russia does not exist, that the Russians are not men, that they lack a moral sense.'

Would you speak of official Russia, of the empire of façades, of the Byzantine-German Government, we are ready to agree with all you may say; the defence in no way encumbers us; the Russian Government has plenty of literary agents in the Parisian press, so that it need never be in want of the most eloquent apologies.

But in your work it is not only a question of official society; you have touched the question in its lowest depths,-you have spoken of the people. The poor Russian people has no one to raise his voice in its behalf. I ask you then, Sir! can we without cowardice keep silence on such an occasion?

The Russian people, Sir! does exist. It lives. It is not even old; it is very young. The young die sometimes, without having lived: that happens, but it is not normal.

The past of the Russian people is obscure; its present is frightful; nevertheless it has some rights to the future: it does not believe in its actual state; it has the temerity to hope, and it hopes so much the more as it possesses less. The most difficult period for the Russian people nears its end. A terrible struggle awaits it; its enemy has been for a century preparing for it.

The great question, the 'to be or not to be' of Russia, will soon be decided. But before the combat one has no right to despair of the result.

The Russian question is acquiring grave and disquieting proportions; all parties seriously concern themselves about it: but it seems to me that they

a

Published in Piedmont, in 1852; and the whole edition seized at Marseilles, stolen by the reigning Order.

Poland and Russia: a Legend of Kosciusko.

concern themselves too much about the Russia of the Tzar-official Russia, too little about that hidden Russia-the Russia of the people.

And, even looking at Russia only in its governmental aspect, think you not that it would be useful to become more thoroughly acquainted with this awkward neighbour who knows how to place in every corner of Europe either a bayonet or a spy? The Russian Government touches the Mediterranean by the protection of the Ottoman-Porte, the Rhine by its protection of German cousins and brothers-in-law, and the Atlantic by its protection of ORDER in France.

It would be well-I say-to appreciate at its real worth this universal protector, and to see if this strange empire has indeed no other reason for its existence except that hideous vocation which has been given to it by the Government of Petersburg-to be a stone blocking up the high-road of Humanity.

Europe is close upon a terrible cataclysm. The world of the Middle Ages is at its end; the feudal world is dying. Religious and political revolutions sink under the weight of their own impotence; they have accomplished great things, but they have not been equal to their task; they have spoiled the altar and the throne of their prestige, without realizing Liberty; they have lit desices in men's hearts without offering any means of satisfying them. Parliamentarianism, Protestantism,-all that has been only adjournment, provisional safety, dyke-digging, to siop for some moments death and birth. This time is over. Since 1848 it has been seen that neither reminiscences of Roman law, nor a caitiff legality, nor a meagre deistical philosophy, nor a barren religious rationalism, can adjourn the accomplishment of our social destinies.

The storm approaches; one can no more mistake as to that; revolutionists and reactionists are agreed upon it. The vertigo seizes the whole world; a serious question, a question of life and death, weighs upon its heart. Men are disquieted, agitated; they ask themselves if Europe, that old Proteus, that worn-out organism, can yet find sufficient force to work out its own regeneration. They dread the answer; they groan with their uncertainty.

The question indeed is weighty.

Ay! Can that old Europe change her atrophicd blood and leap beyond sight into that boundless future which draws us in with irresistible, passionate, and fatal power, and toward which we precipitate ourselves, at and against all, no matter though we pass over the ruins of our fathers' homes or scatter the treasures of civilizations long passed away and the riches of the latest culture? By both sides the question is equally well appreciated. Europe reënters the dark and thick night which must precede the dawn of this decisive struggle. There is no longer existence, but a mere waiting, an anxiety. Everything is overturned. No more legality, no more justice, not even the phantom of liberty; an irreligious lay Inquisition reigns absolutely; the laws are replaced by martial law as of a place in a state of siege. One sole moral force presides, dictates, ordains,-Fear; that is enough. All questions are treated as second to the one great reactionary interest. Governments apparently of the most opposite principles blend fraternally together as one single ecumenical police. The Emperor of Russia, not concealing his hatred of the French, rewards the

prefect of the Paris police; the King of Naples, with his jailor-hand, decorates the President of the Republic. The King of Berlin, muffled in his Russian uniform, runs to Warsaw to throw himself in the arms of his enemy, the Emperor of Austria, under the tutelary benediction of Nicholas, that schismatic Tzar who, in his turn, offers his troops to the Roman Pontiff. In the midst of this witches' sabbath-this valkyrian night of reaction, all individual safety has disappeared, and those guarantees which exist even in the least advanced societies, in China and in Persia, are no longer respected in the capitals of the ex-civilized world.

We no longer recognize ourselves. Is this really the Europe which we have known and loved?

And of a truth, if there was no England, free and proud, if that 'precious stone set in the silver sea,' as Shakspere says, ceased to shine; if Switzerland, like the Apostle Peter, persisted through fear of the Cæsar in denying her principles; if Piedmont, that sole free and strong arm of Italy, if, I say, this refuge of civilization hunted from the North and falling back behind the Alps without daring to pass the Apennines, was suddenly closed against all human feelings; if, in a word, those three countries were infected by the baleful breath of Paris and Vienna, then one might believe that the old world had been entirely destroyed by the parricidal hands of the conservatives, and that barbarism had already begun in Germany and in France.

In the midst of this chaos, this mad agony, this torturing travail, in the midst of this world crumbling putrifyingly round a cradle, all eyes are involuntarily directed toward the East.

Like to a dark mountain slowly emerging from the mist, we distinguish there a hostile and threatening empire; we would even say that it is rushing forward like an avalanche, or like some heir eager to shorten the dying man's last moments.

This empire, unknown two centuries ago, has all at once rudely presented itself, and, without invitation and without right, has taken its seat at the council-board of the sovereigns of Europe, peremptorily demanding its share of the booty, toward the conquest of which it had in no way contributed.

No one dares dispute its pretensions to meddle in the affairs of Europe. Charles XII made the attempt, but his till then invincible sword broke in the trial. Frederic II wished to oppose the incroachments of the Court of Petersburg; Konigsberg and Berlin fell into the power of the enemy of the North. The Tzar Napoleon, at the head of half a million of men, penetrated to the very heart of the giant; he stole out alone in a miserable hack sledge. Europe beheld with amazement the flight of Napoleon, with clouds of Cossacks pursuing him, Russian armies on the road to Paris casting to Germany on their way the alms of her national independence. Like a monstrous vampire, she seems to exist only to fatten on the faults of peoples and of kings. Yesterday we saw her almost crush Austria in aiding her against Hungary; tomorrow we may see her proclaim the Duchy of Brandenburg a province of the Russian empire, by way of support to the King of Berlin.

And to think on the eve of the grand struggle so little should be known of

this new combatant who, insolent and armed cap-a-pie, stands ready to pass the frontier on the first appeal from his reactionary friends. Scarcely are his armour and the colour of his banner known; and men believe in his official words, holding to vague notions without remarking the contradictions in the various reports afloat concerning him.

Some speak only of the omnipotence of the Tzar, of governmental insolence, of the servility of the subject. Others say that the imperialism of Petersburg is not national, and that the people, bowed beneath the double yoke of the monarch and the nobles, endures their oppression, but does not accept it; that it is not annihilated, but only unhappy. And yet this same population serves as a cement to the mighty colossus oppressing it. Others add that the Russian people is a vile multitude of drunkards and helots; and others again bear witness to a gifted and intelligent race in Russia.

There is to me something tragic in this senile state of distraction with which the old world confounds all notions concerning its antagonist.

Through this mass of contradictory opinions pierce so many positive facts (connaissances immobiles), a levity so melancholy, and such tenacious prejudices, that in spite of ourselves we find no comparison in history except that of the decline of the Roman empire.

Then also, on the eve of the Christian Revolution, on the eve of the barbarians' victory, they proclaimed the eternity of Rome, the powerless folly of the Nazarean sect, and the chimerical absurdity of the dangers which the movement in the barbarous world announced.

It is to you, Sir! that justly belongs the merit of having been the first to speak in France of the Russia of the people; you had already laid your hand upon its heart, on the very source of its life, the truth springing up under the impression of your powerful genius, when suddenly by an angry impulse you withdrew that fraternal hand, and immediately the source appeared to you troubled and confused.

I have read with profound sorrow your angry words. Grieving, my heart full, I acknowledge that I sought in vain the historian, the philosopher, and more than that, the living man whom we all knew. Let me say that I perfectly appreciate the cause of your indignation; sympathy for unhappy Poland has spoken by you. Sir! we also recognize this sympathy for our Polish brothers, and with us it is not compassion; it is remorse, it is shame.

Love Poland? We all love her. But is it an inevitable consequence of this feeling that we would sacrifice to her a people equally unhappy, a people forced to lend its bound hands to a ferocious government, wherewith to commit its crimes? Let us be generous, and let us not forget that we have just seen a people who, armed with universal suffrage and national bayonets, has none the less consented to the reëstablishment of the 'order' of Warsaw at Rome Do we not see to-day-but rather look yourself at what passes before your eyes. And yet we do not say that the French have ceased to be men; we wait. It is time to forget this wretched struggle between brothers; among us there is no conqueror; Poland and Russia succumb to a common enemy. The