A shrug of the shoulders was his answer. "Above all things there is the great anxiety and fear at the responsibility. There is also a weakness on account of conscientious scruples. The Emperor knows nothing thoroughly enough to enable him to overcome the arguments of a skilled sophist, and he is too indulgent to say to one of his counsellors, 'Sir, you are a cheat.' He hears in the reports only praise of somebody, never any censure. For he has a great dread of intrigue, and not without good reason. The atmosphere is a fearful one in the vicinity of every autocrat. The Czar is pathetically well-meaning, and is modesty itself, but he is not the autocrat for an autocracy, who must be equal to his task." "And what, in your excellency's opinion, should be done to help the country?" "No more than the rest of the world has already accomplished. Abolition of the police system, security of personal freedom, abolition of the censorship, discontinuance of the persecution of sectarians, who are our best subjects, and--I say the word quietly--a constitution." "And would the country really be helped thereby?" "Unconditionally. With these little concessions to-day any political convulsion could be avoided, and the intelligent class freed from its fetters. No one knows what will be offered ten years from now." "Are there prospects of this concession?" "Not the slightest. On the contrary, whoever falls under the suspicion of unconditional approval of the present system may be morally destroyed at any time." "What will then be the end?" "That the terror from above will awaken the terror from below, that peasant revolts will break out--even now the police must be augmented in the interior--and assassination will increase." "And is there no possibility of organizing the revolution so that it shall not rage senselessly?" "Impossible. Our rural nobleman is, to be sure, not a junker; but the strength of the régime consists in the exclusion of any understanding between the land-owners and the peasants because of the social and intellectual chasm between them." "Your excellency, I remember a saying of Strousberg's, who was a good business man, 'There is nowhere a hole where there once was land.' One learns to doubt that here in Russia. There is not one with whom I have spoken who would fail to paint the future of this country in the darkest colors. Can there be no change of the fatal policy that is ruining the country?" "Not before a great general catastrophe. When we shall be compelled, for the first time, partly to repudiate our debts--and that may happen sooner than we now believe--on that day, being no longer able to pay our old debts with new ones--for we shall no longer be able to conceal our internal bankruptcy from foreign countries and from the Emperor--steps will be taken, perhaps, towards a general convention. No sooner." "Is there no mistake possible here?"