In fine one must mention prison-reform, though the state of Russian jails decades later does not dispose us to attach much importance to it. During Alexander’s earlier years, we saw, there was at St. Petersburg a great regard for English ideas, and at that time England was producing many humanitarians. Robert Owen was then elaborating his comprehensive and advanced schemes of reform, from the betterment of schools and prisons to the substitution of arbitration for war. It is the enfeebled echo of these liberal English ideas, and of American and French ideas, that we find in the Russian schemes. One of the English prison-reformers, Mr. Venning, asked permission to visit the Russian jails. The Tsar, who was still in his early humanitarian fervour, gladly assented, and asked Venning to make a report to him on what he saw. As a result a Society for the Welfare of Prisoners was founded at St. Petersburg, and afterwards at Moscow. These liberal ideas represent, it must be understood, the early attitude of the Emperor. After the fall of Speranski in 1812, and especially after the Tsar’s close association with Metternich in 1814, Alexander passed slowly from a state of nebulous zeal for Charity and Justice to an attitude of positive reaction, tempered by a faint lingering glow of his early dreams. Metternich persuaded him that the real struggle of light and darkness was the struggle of the enlightened monarchies against these democratic and “atheistic” emanations from the smothered volcano of the French Revolution. In private he cynically observed to his friends: “I have the Tsar safely at anchor.” The humanitarian ideas on which the United States had been set up, and the early and sane part of the French Revolution had been based, remained in the mind of Europe. They threatened the restored monarchies, which reverted to mediæval ideas of their power, and the terrible conflict which fills the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe began long before the death of Alexander. It is to his credit that he recognised the blunders and crimes of his fellow-monarchs and never entirely sacrificed his early ideals.