When we read such lines as the above and recall how that gracious and benignant nobility have drenched Russia with blood of peasants, Jews, city workingmen, republican agitators—littering the streets with ghastly heaps of murdered men and women and children—we may well stand amazed at the success with which the wool was pulled over the eyes of the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage, D. D. “There are no kinder people on earth than the Russians, and to most of them cruelty is an impossibility.” [Illustration: “Dr. Talmage did not go to Siberia, which he compared to Italy.”] Of the Czar, Doctor Talmage says: “He’s doing the best things possible for the nation which he loved, and which as ardently loved him.... Things are going on marvelously well, and I do not believe that out of 500,000 Russians you will find _more than one person_ who dislikes the Emperor, and so that Calumny of dread of assassination drops so flat it can fall no flatter.” [Illustration: “I prophecy for Nicholas the Second a long and happy reign.”—Dr. Talmage] According to Doctor Talmage the story that the Czar dreaded the assassin was a base Calumny, and he, Talmage, flattened it out in his book “so flat it can fall no flatter.” I wonder what the present Czar would feel, think and say if he could _now_ read Talmage’s comfortable assurances on the subject of “dread of assassination.” * * * * * While in Russia, Doctor Talmage saw the Rulers, and no others. He talked with the governing class, and no others. He saw a ship from the United States bringing bread to the Russian farmers, but it never occurred to his mind that a drouth in one portion of the huge Russian Empire was no good reason why the New World should have to save Russian peasants from starvation. Looking only on the surface, seeing only what his “old friend” the Czar, wished him to see, he praised the Russian government in terms of the most unqualified eulogy. Before the Talmage book was ready for the press, Prince Cantacuzene, the Russian Minister Plenipotentiary at Washington, summoned Doctor Talmage to the deck of a Russian man-of-war, in Philadelphia harbor, and presented to the enraptured American “a complete gold-enameled tea service accompanied by a message of love which I cannot now think of without deep emotion, since Emperor Alexander has disappeared from the palaces of earth to take his place, as I believe, in the palaces of heaven.” In behalf of the Czar, the formalities of a trial on Judgment Day, were waived, it would seem; and the Czar went direct from Peterhof to his mansion in the skies. The Emperor Alexander, it is well-known, was succeeded by his son Nicholas, the reigning Czar. Talmage’s book was published in 1896. Here is what he predicted: “_I prophesy for Nicholas the Second a long and happy reign!_”