“Now ask the Russian,” said Peter. “My punishment was just!” said the Russian, coolly, putting on his clothes as if nothing had happened; “God and the Czar were angry with me!” “Come away, Count,” said the Czar; “and now solve me a problem. I know both those men, and the German, in a battle, would be the braver of the two. How comes it that he weeps and writhes like a girl, while the Russian bears the same pain without a murmur?” “Will your Majesty forgive me,” said I, “but I cannot help wishing that the Russian had complained more bitterly; insensibility to punishment is the sign of a brute, not a hero. Do you not see that the German felt the indignity, the Russian did not? and do you not see that that very pride which betrays agony under the disgrace of the battaog is exactly the very feeling that would have produced courage in the glory of the battle? A sense of honour makes better soldiers and better men than indifference to pain.” “But had I ordered the Russian to death, he would have gone with the same apathy and the same speech, ‘It is just! I have offended God and the Czar!’” “Dare I observe, Sire, that that fact would be a strong proof of the dangerous falsity of the old maxims which extol indifference to death as a virtue? In some individuals it may be a sign of virtue, I allow; but, as a _national trait_, it is the strongest sign of national misery. Look round the great globe. What countries are those where the inhabitants bear death with cheerfulness, or, at least, with apathy? Are they the most civilized, the most free, the most prosperous? Pardon me; no! They are the half-starved, half-clothed, half-human sons of the forest and the waste; or, when gathered in states, they are slaves without enjoyment or sense beyond the hour; and the reason that they do not recoil from the pangs of death is because they have never known the real pleasures or the true objects of life.” “Yet,” said the Czar, musingly, “the contempt of death was the great characteristic of the Spartans.” “And, therefore,” said I, “the great token that the Spartans were a miserable horde. Your Majesty admires England and the English; you have, beyond doubt, witnessed an execution in that country; you have noted, even where the criminal is consoled by religion, how he trembles, and shrinks,--how dejected, how prostrate of heart he is before the doom is completed. Take now the vilest slave, either of the Emperor of Morocco or the great Czar of Russia. He changes neither tint nor muscle; he requires no consolation; he shrinks from no torture. What is the inference? _That slaves dread death less than the free_. And it should be so. The end of legislation is not to make _death_, but _life_, a blessing.” “You have put the matter in a new light,” said the Czar; “but you allow that, in individuals, contempt of death is sometimes a virtue.”