Rasputin, taken individually, did not deserve any notice. He was never in possession of the influence which was attributed to him, and his voice was never preponderant in the councils of the Czar. It served the interests of those whose tool he had become to spread the notion that he had acquired it, and that, thanks to the religious enthusiasm which he had contrived to arouse among a certain small circle of influential men and women, he had installed himself in the confidence of his Sovereign. Unfortunately for Russia, these people not only had accomplices in their evil deeds, but also had the means to spread their opinions among the public and the ability to make these opinions penetrate into all the different classes of the nation. They discredited the Imperial family; they discredited the Government of the day; they discredited the monarch, until it became at last a political, and I shall even say a national, necessity to suppress them, together with the adventurer whom they had put forward and thanks to whom they had been able to play unmolested for so many years the most nefarious of games. Unfortunately, the slaying of Rasputin did not destroy the persons who had used him. It did not put an end to the many abuses which had brought Russia to the sad state of chaos in which it found itself at the moment of its great trial. The man himself was but an ensign, and the loss of an ensign does not mean that the regiment that carried it about has shared its fate. Rasputin was the last representative of the old régime. His appearance on the horizon of Russian social life was but the last flicker of a detestable past. During his time of favour and of success the two forces that struggled for supremacy in the land of his birth fought their last battle, in which he was the stake. We must rejoice that it was not the force which he was supposed to incarnate in his enigmatical and mysterious person that remained master of the field. Whether he would have been killed under different circumstances is a question to which it would be very difficult to find a reply. Most probably the spirit of mysticism which lies at the bottom of the Slav character would have prevented even his worst enemies, let alone his simple adversaries, from trying to remove him from the position into which he had been thrust. They would most likely have shrugged their shoulder and waited for that intervention of St. Nicolas, who, according to Russian traditions, always arrives at the right moment, to put straight everything that has gone wrong.