“If that means having shopmen,” said the professor, “such as Chatham, Fox, Burke, Gladstone, Bright, and Morley, I wish we were also a nation of shopkeepers. If a nation’s destinies are controlled by men like Alexeiev and Bezobrassov it does not seem to me to make it less like a shop, only the shop is managed on dishonest principles.” “The greatest of all English thinkers,” answered the landlord, “was a dishonest official, Lord Bacon; her greatest soldier a general who peculated, the Duke of Marlborough. The man who made England’s prestige dwindle to its lowest depth was Gladstone.” “We cannot reach a lower depth than that to which the Bureaucracy has brought us,” said the student. “As a remedy you want liberal demagogues,” said the landlord. “What we want is not a change of kind, but of quality; not a Liberal Cabinet and a Liberal autocrat, but a capable Cabinet and a capable autocrat; and, therefore, I support the revolutionaries, in the hope that out of the ruins and ashes of what they will destroy the phœnix may arise.” “And we,” said the student, “can do without phœnixes, which we regard as a doubtful blessing; on the other hand, what we want, and what we are determined to get, are laws, not manifestoes—laws guaranteeing the elementary rights of liberty and equality; and these we are determined to attain, even at the sacrifice of the peculiar liberty, equality, and fraternity which you say we enjoy; even if the ultimate result be that the Emperor ceases to call us _Bratzi_ (little brothers) and the theatres are closed on Sunday.” ST. PETERSBURG, _February 4th_.