There is one curious thing contrasting with the facility with which Nicholas II. accepted the opinions of others, and with his total absence of personal initiative; and that is the persistence with which he maintained himself during the whole time that his reign lasted, in one line of conduct which never varied in regard to the determination to govern his country in a despotic sense, and which was the more singular that he never knew the meaning of real authority. He always kept listening to those who represented to him that the first duty of a Russian Emperor consisted in keeping up the prestige of the police before the mass of the citizens. Under no reign in Russia, if we except the dark period of the Opritschnikys under Ivan the Terrible, did the police play such an important part in public life, or become guilty of more abuses and of more malversations of every kind. I will not mention here the horrors which took place during and after the revolution of 1905, when no one felt secure against an anonymous denunciation, the consequences of which might be that one saw oneself exiled in Siberia, simply because one had not sufficiently bribed the police officer in charge of the district where one lived; but later on, even after things had calmed down, the might of what was called the Okhrana, remained just as formidable as it had been before. Literally no one could feel safe under this so-called liberal Czar, whilst under the reign of his father everybody possessed of a good and clear conscience could rest peacefully in the certitude that neither the security of his domicile or his personal safety would ever be threatened or infringed upon by the caprice of this secret power called by the vague name of “administration.”