despotically than was his father, or that he would be averse to the recovery of the position which was held by his uncle and his father. We find not the slightest evidence, in all the proceedings of the Russian Government, that the _people_ whom the Czar means to create are to be endowed with political freedom. A more vigorous race of Russians, morally speaking, is needed, and, except in some parts of the United States, there are no men to be found capable of arguing that any portion of the human family is susceptible of improvement through servitude. The serf is naturally clever, and can "turn his hand" to almost anything. The inference that freedom would exalt his mind and improve his condition is one that was logically drawn at St. Petersburg and Moscow, though they reason differently at Richmond and Montgomery. An army recruited from slaves could not, in these times, when even bayonets think and cannon reason much more accurately than they did when Louis XIV. was a pattern monarch, ever look in the face the intelligent trained legions of France or England or Germany. A combination of political circumstances, similar to those of 1840, might give victory to a grand Russian army, like that laurelless triumph which was then won in Hungary, when the victors were nothing but the bloodhounds and gallows-feeders of the House of Austria; but of _military_ glory the present Russians could hope to have no more. To regain the place they had held, it was necessary that they should be made personally free. That they might be the better prepared to enslave others, they were themselves to be converted into men. The freedom of the individuals might be the means of supplying soldiers who should equal the fanatics who followed Suvaroff, or the patriots who followed Kutusoff, or the avengers who followed the first Alexander to Paris. The experiment, at all events, was worth trying; and the Czar is trying it on a scale that most impressively affects both the mind and the imagination of mankind, who may learn that his works are destined greatly to bear upon their interests.