M. De Plehve was in the State what M. Pobiedonostseff was in the Church. The Minister of the Interior, like the Imperial Procurator of the Holy Synod, represented and led for the last two decades or more the party of reaction. By their Panslavist followers these two men were described as the two pillars of the patriotic edifice of Russian national life, which is raised on the ruins of the other nationalities. By their opponents they were denounced as the two ministering demons of Despotism and Dogmatism under their most repulsive aspects. It was, therefore, with no surprise that the civilised world heard on July 28, 1904, that M. De Plehve’s name had been entered on the roll of Russian victims to that ruthless spirit of revenge, whose cult their own ruthlessness helps to promote. He died unlamented, as he had lived unloved; for a tyrant has no friends. But that he was, as an individual, the incarnate fiend that his enemies depicted, is a theory improbable in itself, and disproved by those who came into contact with him. At the very worst he may have been an ambitious man who, by pursuing the course which he did, “sought to win the favour of the reactionary faction which at present controls the Czar, and thus to fight his way towards the highest power.”[197] But a less severe estimate would, perhaps, be nearer the true one. M. De Plehve was the champion of an ideal. He honestly believed that in autocracy lay Russia’s salvation. Though surrounded by dangers, and warned by the fate of his former master Alexander II., of his predecessor Sipyaghin, of his instrument in the oppression of Finland Bobrikoff, and of many of his colleagues and subordinates, he unflinchingly persevered in the path which he had marked out for himself. A man who imperils his own life in the pursuit of a certain object is not the man to treat with tenderness those who strive to thwart him. M. De Plehve’s object was to silence opposition to the principles of autocracy. He pursued that object with the unswerving firmness of a strong man, and crushed the obstacles with the relentless conscientiousness of one who is absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. To such a man political virtue means thoroughness combined with an utter lack of scruple and a total disregard of all moral restraint in the service of the State and the pursuit of its welfare. He was engaged in a game the stakes of which were greatness or death. He lost it.