We heard a Russian gentleman remark that, in fighting with the Anglo-French powers, they should at the least have the advantage of doing so with people more enlightened than themselves, and, gain or lose, they should still profit, for, even if they were beaten, they should acquire greater civilization; and he adduced Prussia in illustration of the proposition, “for she would never be the nation she is were it not for her wars with France.” Intense indignation was also expressed on account of the new warlike inventions. “Look at those long-range guns and asphyxiant balls; it is a perfect disgrace to any people to invent such, and it is cowardice and baseness to make use of them.” The knowledge of the superiority of English mechanism and wonderful machinery, of which even the lower classes in St. Petersburg have some idea, seemed more than anything else to inspire them with terror, and by them nothing was considered impossible for the English to perform. I heard a common man say one day to another, with a grave shake of his head, “The English, ah! there is no getting on against them!” and such seemed to be the universal impression. I was informed that many of the lower classes in the capital had the idea that, if the English conquered them, they should be no longer slaves, and not have a poll-tax to pay. If this be true, and I was assured it was so, who can calculate what the consequences of such a belief spread among the populace might be, or how soon the hollow fabric of the Russian government would fall into ruins? If this conviction once enter into the national mind, the nobility may soon find that they have a greater enemy in their oppressed peasantry than in a foreign army. They have a thousand years of wrongs and slavery to avenge, and, like the heaving of ground in an earthquake, they will shake and topple down the mighty strongholds and towers of those who vainly hope to tread them under their feet for ever. It was the opinion of many when I left St. Petersburg that the eighty thousand soldiers (as the Russians said) bivouacked in the streets and billeted on the houses, were a great deal more for the purpose of ensuring peace within the barriers of the town than for that of repelling a foreign invader _au dehors_.[24] Everything that could be done by the government for raising the anger and fanaticism of the people against the English was resorted to, and it was nothing uncommon to hear many of the lower classes declare that they would cut the throats of all the heretics within reach as soon as they heard the sound of the cannon at Cronstadt, as the sacrifice of a certain number of them was necessary in order to ensure the victory on their side. A pleasant prospect for our poor countrymen left in the capital! But it is not astonishing, taught, as they are, that we are heretics, that all their fanatical feelings are raised and all their barbarian antipathy set in antagonism to us and the French.