The heads of the conspiracy in St Petersburg were, Sergius, Prince Troubetskoi; Eugene, Prince Obalenskoi, and Conrad Ryleieff. The first was highly connected and highly employed, colonel of the Etat Major, and military governor of Kief. The second was a lieutenant in the imperial guard, poor, but a man of talent and ambition. In Russia all the sons of a prince are princes, which often leaves their rental bare. The third was simply a noble, educated in the corps of cadets, but who had left the army, and had taken the secretaryship of the American company. He was a man of letters, had written some popular poems, and was an enthusiastic republican. Connected with those were some general officers and colonels, whose revolutionary spirit might chiefly be traced to their expulsion from employment, military disgrace, or disappointed ambition. The Russian campaigns in France, and the residence of the army of occupation, under the command of the great English general, had naturally given the Russian troops an insight into principles of national government, which they could not have acquired within the Russian frontier. The pretext of the conspirators was a constitutional government, which the talkers of St Petersburg seemed to regard as the inevitable pouring of sudden prosperity of all kinds into the empire. The old illusion of all the advocates of change is, that every thing depends on government, and that government can do every thing. There cannot be a greater folly, or a more glaring fiction. Government can do nothing more than prevent the existence of obstacles to public wealth. It cannot give wealth, it cannot create commerce, it cannot fertilise the soil, it cannot put in action any of those great instruments by which a nation rises superior to its contemporaries. Those means must be in the people themselves, they cannot be the work of cabinets; governments can do no more than give them their free course, protect them from false legislation, and leave the rest to Providence. The Russian conspirators called themselves patriots, and professed to desire a bloodless revolution. But to overthrow a government at the head of five hundred thousand men, must be a sanguinary effort; and there could be no doubt that the establishment of a revolutionary government in Russia would have been the signal for a universal war.