Such a thorough weakness of character was bound to bring about the most serious consequences, and these did not fail to produce themselves. If Nicholas II. had had beside him a wife able to lead him, to advise him, to open his eyes which perhaps he did not quite close, but which he was never to succeed in keeping sufficiently open, and to show him not only the perils which surrounded him (these she never forgot to point out to him in an exaggerated manner), but also to bring to his notice his duties towards his subjects, he might have become a Sovereign like any other, neither better nor worse, insignificant perhaps, but never really dangerous for his country or for his dynasty. Even if that wife he was so devoted to had wished not to identify herself with State affairs, had kept outside them, and not surrounded herself with people lost to every sense of shame, he might have come out of the numerous difficulties with which he found himself confronted, if not exactly to his honour and credit, at least without losing too much of his prestige. But Alexandra Feodorovna was the fatal and dissolving element which destroyed, thanks to her attitude and conduct, every scrap of respect for the Sovereign, and who inspired in the whole of the nation the desire to get rid of an authority in which it believed no longer, and in which it saw only an obstacle in the way of its development and of its historical evolution. The Empress understood even less than her husband the state of mind of his subjects; she raised between him and them a barrier which nothing could destroy, because it was made out of the contempt which they both inspired in the whole of Russia.