Read Ebook: Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea the Crimea the Caucasus &c. by Hommaire De Hell Ad Le Hommaire De Hell Xavier

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and destitution. In the treatment of this great social question, it is before all things necessary that the government should come to a fair understanding with the nobles, and labour conjointly with them for the regeneration of the slave population: it is only by earnest mutual aid that those two powers will ever succeed in advancing the cause of emancipation without imminent peril to the empire. But in any case, there is no denying the many difficulties of this enterprise, no answering for all future contingencies. Considerations connected with landed property will probably long defeat all efforts in this direction, unless the peasants be freely permitted to become landowners, on payment of a certain sum for the redemption of their persons, and the purchase of the land requisite for their subsistence. This seems to us the only rational, nay, the only possible means, of arriving at complete emancipation without violence. No doubt if such a privilege be granted to the peasants, the present improvident and prodigal race of nobles will be rapidly dispossessed; but this will not occasion the country any serious inconvenience, and the new order of things will but favour the development of the middle class, in which really reside, in our day, all the strength and prosperity of a nation.

As for the clergy, whose numbers amount to about 500,000, both males and females, we mention them here only to repeat our declaration of their nullity and immorality. Utterly unacquainted with any thing pertaining to polity and administration, having nothing to do with public instruction, and being in their own persons ignorant to excess, the priests enjoy no sort of influence or consideration, and are occupied solely with corporeal things. We will not enter further into this subject. We are loath to unveil completely the vices and ignoble habits that distinguish the priests of the orthodox Russian church.

The following is a general table of the Russian population as published by the ministry in 1836:

Soldiers and sailors in actual service, their wives and families, not having been included in this total, the gross amount of the population of the empire appears to be about 61,000,000,--at least if we may judge from the ministerial table, the correctness of which we by no means guarantee.

According to the report of the ministry of the interior, the part of the population of European Russia not belonging to the orthodox Greek church, was, in 1839, as follows:

FOOTNOTES:

We have not the honour of being acquainted with the Emperor of Russia's secret thoughts, and we willingly ascribe to a certain liberalism all the ukases concerning the emancipation of the slaves; it is possible, however, that the tzar's measures may have been prompted, in a great degree, by the fears with which he regards an aristocracy still possessing more than 20,000,000 of slaves.

CONSTITUTION OF THE EMPIRE; GOVERNMENTS--CONSEQUENCES OF CENTRALISATION; DISSIMULATION OF PUBLIC FUNCTIONARIES-- TRIBUNALS--THE COLONEL OF THE GENDARMERIE--CORRUPTION-- PEDANTRY OF FORMS--CONTEMPT OF THE DECREES OF THE EMPEROR AND THE SENATE--SINGULAR ANECDOTE; INTERPRETATION OF A WILL --RADICAL EVILS IN THE JUDICIAL ORGANISATION--HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF RUSSIAN LAW.

The Russian governments correspond to the French departments, the districts to sub-prefectures; each government has its chief town, which is the seat of the different civil and military administrations.

Centralisation, no doubt, has its advantages; but in a country so vast, and of such varied wants as Russia, it is impossible that a minister, be his talents what they may, can ever satisfy the reasonable demands of all parts of the empire. The consequence is that the most useful projects are almost always neglected or rejected in the provinces remote from the capital.

Another evil, not less deplorable, is the necessity of practising mutual deception, under which the public functionaries labour. A public servant never thinks of making known to his superior the real situation of the country he governs: either he ridiculously exaggerates the good, or he is absolutely silent as to what is bad. In the latter case, he acts only in accordance with the imperative dictates of prudence, for if he declared the truth he would infallibly incur disgrace, and would even run the risk of being dismissed. So whenever a public calamity happens, it is only at the last extremity, and when the mischief is become irremediable, that he makes up his mind to call for an aid that usually comes not at all, or else is sure to come too late.

The superior court of justice sitting in the chief place of each government, and comprising a civil and a criminal section, consists of two presidents, two councillors, two secretaries, and eight assessors, four of whom are burghers. The emperor endeavoured in 1835 to extend the rights of the nobility, by making the offices of president and judge in these tribunals elective, but this change appears to have produced but very unfavourable results. As all the great proprietors had very little inclination to fill such offices, the electors had no opportunity of making a good choice, and at last it was found necessary to return to the old institutions.

The superior court of justice decides finally in all civil cases, in which the sum in dispute does not exceed 500 rubles. Over it are the various departments of the senate and the general assembly, resident partly in St. Petersburg, and partly in Moscow, and constituting two courts to which appeals lie from the governmental courts. There is no appeal from the decisions of the general assembly of the senate, or from those of the council of the empire approved by the emperor, except on the ground of misrepresentations in the evidence.

The chief towns and the district towns have also a sort of municipal council, consisting of a mayor , and four assistants, elected by the municipality, and afterwards approved of by the government. This council acts also as a tribunal, and takes cognizance of all the petty cases of litigation that may arise among the townsfolk. A nearly similar institution exists among the peasants of the empire.

We will not speak of the colleges of wards, the committees of the nobles presided over by the marshals of the nobles, the courts of conscience which try cases between parents and children, &c. The members of all these institutions are elected, but their functions are too insignificant to demand mention here.

This justiciary scheme is in itself very liberal, and ought, one would suppose, to satisfy the wants of the population; but like the governors, the judges of the different tribunals are in fact but puppets, moved at the discretion of the subordinate clerks, who alone are masters of the tricks and quibbles of Russian jurisprudence, and legal practice. The lowest clerk in a chancery has often more influence than the president himself, and the suitor who refuses to be squeezed by him may be quite certain that he will never see the termination of his cause. It is impossible to imagine with what adroitness all these fellows, many of whom receive for salary only sixty or a hundred rubles a year, manage to sweat the purses of those who require their assistance. Justice is continually violated in favour of the highest bidder, and thanks to the number of contradictory ukases which pass for laws, the most audacious robberies are unblushingly committed without the possibility of redress. It may be asserted with truth, that the jurisdictional authority in Russia resides in the offices of court rather than in the persons of the judges. The secretary is the omnipotent arbiter of sentences, and dictates them under the influence of money and the bureaucracy.

We have already seen that litigants can appeal to the governmental court, and again to the general assembly of the senate, in all suits for more than five hundred rubles. This privilege instead of being advantageous, appears to us to be highly the reverse. In France, where distances are short, and where justice is administered with a promptitude and impartiality elsewhere unexampled, the appeal to the court of cassation affords the most precious guarantee for the equitable application of the laws. Besides this, it only gives occasions to a revision of the documents in the case, and to a new trial before another tribunal if there have been any error of form; but in Russia, where distances are immense, and where all things conspire to render suits interminable, litigants from the provinces can only ruin themselves by using their right of recourse to the tribunals of St. Petersburg. I have known landowners who spent twenty years of their lives in prosecuting a suit in the capital, and who died without having obtained judgment. It must be acknowledged, however, that appeals to St. Petersburg are justified to a certain extent by the deplorable nature of governmental justice.

It is the same with the senate, the supreme judicial court in the empire. It consists only of military veterans, and superannuated servants of the state; in a word, of men who know nothing whatever of law. Hence it is easy to conceive the unlimited power exercised in all these courts by the government secretaries, who, when they know by heart the some thousands of ukases that form what is called the imperial code, pass for eminent lawyers in the eyes of the Russians.

The same evil affects, to an equal degree, all the administrative departments. In Russia, no calling or profession has its limits strictly defined; a man passes indifferently from one service to another. A cavalry officer, for instance, will be nominated as director of a high school, an old colonel as head of a custom-house, and so forth.

In addition to the laws which are peculiar to it, Russian legislation evidently comprises two foreign elements, the German and the Roman. Germanic law was introduced into Russia by the Varengians, a branch of the Northman stock. To the leaders of those warriors the country owes the origin of its feudal system. Subsequently, when the Russians were converted to Christianity, Vladimir adopted certain parts of the Roman law as modified by the Byzantines. But if we may judge from the documents furnished by the Nestorian chronicle, it would appear, that previously to that epoch, the Russians had already borrowed some particulars from the Roman code, and blended them with their customary law of indigenous and German origin.

The first written code mentioned in Russian history, is that of Jaroslav, who reigned in the beginning of the thirteenth century; from that period the country remained quite stationary, in consequence of the continual wars and troubles occasioned by its territorial division; and more than a century of suffering and anarchy prepared the nation to submit without resistance to a foreign yoke.

It was in 1218 that the Tatars crossed the Volga and seized the dominions of the tzars; and whilst Europe, under the energetic influence of the crusades and of the lights of the Lower Empire, was sapping the edifice of feudalism, and labouring towards its future glorious emancipation, Russia remained for more than 300 years in ignominious thraldom, taking no part in the great intellectual movement of the fifteenth century, retrograding rather than advancing, debasing its national character day by day, and thus heaping up against the progress of civilisation, obstacles which the genius of its modern sovereigns has not yet been able to annihilate.

Since the reign of Peter the Great, ten commissions have been successively employed in the codification of the Russian laws. We will not enter into the details of the changes introduced by them: on this subject, the work published by M. Victor Foucher, and the "Coup d'oeil sur la l?gislation Russe," by M. Tolstoi, may be consulted with advantage. The tenth commission was appointed in 1804, and sat until 1826. It applied itself earnestly to the construction of the civil, penal, and criminal codes; but numerous difficulties prevented it from completing its task.

On his accession to the throne, the Emperor Nicholas promised at first a new code which should correct and complete its predecessors. But the difficulties were too great, and he ended by adopting a digest, which merely classified according to their subjects all the existing laws promulgated since the general regulation of 1649, effected by Alexis Michaelovitz. In 1826, he laid down the following rules for this revision.

The design of the Emperor Nicholas was speedily carried into effect. The complete collection of the laws of the empire was published in 1830; and on the 31st of January, the tzar announced in a manifesto that the classification of the law as a systematic body was terminated. The matter was then spoken of in the Russian journals in 1830:

"The second section of the private chancery of his majesty the emperor has just finished printing the first collection of the laws of the Russian empire from 1649 to December 12, 1825 in forty-five volumes, 4to.

"This collection consists of four principal parts: 1, the text of the laws from the general regulation of 1649 to the first manifesto of the Emperor Nicholas , in forty volumes. This part comprises 30,920 laws, rules, treaties, and acts of various kinds; 2, a general index containing a chronological table, which is in some sort a juridical dictionary for Russia; 3, a book of the appointments of civil functionaries and of the administrative expenditure and the tariffs from 1711 to 1825, to the number of 1351; 4, a book of the plans and designs pertaining to the several laws.

"The laws and acts belonging to the reign of his majesty the Emperor Nicholas, will form the second collection beginning on the 12th of December, 1825. The printing is already begun, and it will appear in the course of the year. A supplement to it will afterwards be published every year.

"The laws anterior to the year of 1649, which are generally considered as obsolete, but which are nevertheless of high importance as regards, history, will form a separate collection under the name of the ancient laws.

"This first collection was begun in 1826, and finished on the 1st of March, 1830. The printing began on the 21st of May, 1828, and ended on the 1st of April last, at the press of the second section of his majesty's chancery. For the composition of this collection, it has been necessary to collate and extract from 3396 books of laws. The forty volumes of the text, and the volume of the chronological index, contain 5284 printed sheets.

"This book will be ready for sale on the 1st of June at the printing-office. The price of the forty-five volumes is 500 paper rubles.

Thus the code of the Emperor Nicholas is, in fact, but a systematic collection of all the laws promulgated within the last 200 years, or thereabouts. It contains not one new idea, not one modification required by the actual situation of the empire, not one thought for the future. Now if we reflect that the study of 3396 books of laws, and the revision of 50,000 laws or ukases, have taken place within the short period of two years, and that the men who had to perform this task, were far from being jurisconsults, we shall perceive that such a work must be very imperfect, and that it must have been totally impossible to fulfil the intentions of the tzar, as expressed in the instructions above cited. The empire, indeed, possesses fifty-five bulky volumes of laws, but the inconveniences resulting from the multiplicity of contradictory ukases, and from others ill adapted to the necessities of the country, have been retained in them to a great extent; and the experience of thirteen years has shown the insufficiency of this collection, and its little influence on the course and conduct of lawsuits. Another defective point in this improvisated legislation, is its pretension to satisfy the requirements of the future by admitting, as a complement to the body of the statutes, all the ukases issued, or to be issued by the emperor. If to these 30,920 laws already existing, this palladium of justice already so formidable, there be added every year a supplementary volume equal in capacity to the average legislative contributions of the last 180 years, every year will then supply its battalion of 172 new laws; and I am at a loss to conceive where there will be found by-and-by a lawyer sufficiently patient to study this new levy of justice, when with all the good will imaginable the most indefatigable reader can hardly once in his life pass in review the body of the veterans.

In the space of five years since the emperor's manifesto , five new volumes have been already added to the collection.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the emperor's performance is extremely meritorious. To him belongs the honour of having been the first to bestow a regular body of laws on his country. Before his time Russia had but a confused and fluctuating legislation, encumbered with an infinity of statutes, the study of which was the more difficult, as no printed collection of them existed. At present it possesses at least a complete digest, within reach of all, and which all may consult and appeal to. Surely a man of the emperor's perseverance and great capacity would not have shrunk from accomplishing a more perfect work, could he have indulged the hope of being seconded by abler and better instructed jurisconsults. But he was compelled of necessity to take the consequences of the want of any thing like a corps of magistrature, and finding he could not do any thing better, he resolved to make no change in the spirit of the laws promulgated during the preceding 200 years, and to follow exactly the course marked out in 1700 by Peter the Great. In this way the codification of the laws became a mere effort of compilation and arrangement, and setting aside the collation of the ukases, the clerks of the second section of the imperial chancery were quite competent to the task.

It will not be altogether uninteresting to place here a detailed table of the population in a governmental chief town. An examination of such documents may lead to very curious comparisons and reflections. The town we have chosen is Kichinev, the capital of Bessarabia, and the figures we give have been extracted directly from the books of the provincial governor's chancery.

FOOTNOTES:

The official correspondence of the ministers, and of the civil and military authorities, amounts annually to nearly 15,000,000 of letters, whilst that of all private Russians does not exceed 7,000,000.

PUBLIC INSTRUCTION--CORPS OF CADETS--UNIVERSITIES AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS; ANECDOTE--PLAN OF EDUCATION--MOTIVES FOR ATTENDING THE UNIVERSITIES--STATISTICS--PROFESSORS; THEIR IGNORANCE--EXCLUSION OF FOREIGN PROFESSORS--ENGINEERING-- OBSTACLES TO INTELLECTUAL IMPROVEMENT--CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCLAVONIC RACE.

In contemplating the development and organisation of public instruction in Russia from the time of Peter the Great to these days, one cannot help thinking that the Russians attach infinitely more value to the appearance of progress, than to its real existence. One would say they care very little about scientific and intellectual results, provided their universities and schools be complete in all physical details, and provided they have numerous educational halls graced with the names of all the sciences professed in Europe.

Nevertheless, the sovereigns of Russia have all laboured more or less actively for the propagation of public instruction. Unfortunately they would never suffer themselves to admit that civilisation is a long and difficult work; and incapable of forgetting, even amidst the liberal ideas on which they based their projects, that they were before all things absolute princes, they fancied they could civilise their nation as they had disciplined their soldiers; and then, swayed by vanity and self-conceit, they graciously suffered themselves to be deceived by all the brilliant reports laid before them by the administrative departments.

The first elementary institution of any importance founded in the new capital, dates only from the beginning of the eighteenth century: it is the school of the cadet corps, exclusively reserved for the young nobility, and intended to form officers for the land and sea service, and for the engineers. In order to judge of the instruction afforded in it, one ought to be able at least to mention some of its pupils who have been distinguished for their talents, and who have acquired a certain degree of celebrity; but it is as difficult to name any such, as to discover men of learning and science among the members of the various academies mentioned above. Be this as it may, we cannot help entertaining a very mean opinion of the spirit and organisation of all these establishments founded by Peter the Great, and by the sovereigns who succeeded him during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

A German gentleman in the Russian service travelled in the Crimea, in 1803. On passing through Kharkof, curiosity induced him to visit the university, which had been opened in the town about a year before. While looking over the cabinet of natural philosophy, he perceived with amazement that the professor of that branch of science did not even know the names of the few instruments at his command. Unable to conceal his surprise, he asked his guide where he had been professor before he became attached to the university. "I never was a professor before," was the reply. "Where did you study?" "I learned to read and write in Moscow." "How did you obtain the rank of professor of natural philosophy?" "I was an officer of police; my age no longer allowed me to support the fatigues of my duty; so hearing that a place which would suit me better was vacant in the academy, I applied for it. Thirty years' service, good certificates, and the influence of a patron, enabled me to obtain it." "And what are the duties belonging to your place?" "I have to inspect the instruments, and keep them in order, and I am directed to show them to such persons of distinction as may please to visit the university."

This happened, it is true, in 1803, and I only mention the fact to show the spirit that prevailed in the establishment of these learned institutions. The university of Kharkof is now in a better condition, and I know many professors there of real merit, distinguished among whom are Doctor Vancetti, equally remarkable for his acquirements and his philanthropy, and Professor Kalenitchikov, who devotes himself with success to all branches of natural history.

At last, however, it was felt that universities were insufficient, and could not exist without elementary schools. Some years after the accession of Alexander, gymnasiums were therefore established in all the governmental chief towns; and the district towns had their primary institutions, in which were to be taught reading and writing, the elements of grammar and arithmetic, the history of Russia, sacred history, geography, geometry, and the rudiments of Latin.

The course of instruction in the gymnasia was more extensive, and embraced special mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and physics. Lastly, the pupil was advanced to the university, where he went through a complete course of study, comprising the sciences, the liberal arts, literature.

At first sight it would appear that this well conceived plan of studies ought to have had the most satisfactory results; but this was not altogether the case. The nobiliary system of the empire, and certain regulations of detail and discipline combined to destroy the reasonable hopes founded on such liberal institutions.

The Russian universities unquestionably number among their professors some distinguished men, equally devoted to science and to the duties of their calling; but the social ideas prevalent in the country render their efforts almost always unavailing, and they find themselves compelled to restrict their course of instruction within the narrow routine prescribed to them.

Now and always the universities and gymnasia are and have been for the most part attended only by pupils of the class of petty nobles, or of those of the priests and burghers. As for the sons of the aristocratic families, they are generally educated at home by private tutors, and as they are almost all intended for the army, they enter at once into the corps of cadets established in St. Petersburg.

According to a table published by the ministry of the interior, all the first class establishments for public instruction, that is to say the universities, the two medico-chirurgical academies, the pedagogic institute and the three lycea, contained in 1840 only 612 functionaries and professors, and 3809 pupils, the numbers being thus made up:

| Functionaries | | and Teachers. | Students. | | St. Petersburg | 59 | 433 Moscow | 82 | 932 Dorpat | 66 | 530 Kharkof | 79 | 468 Kasan | 74 | 237 St. Vladimir | 55 | 140 Richelieu Lyceum | 25 | 52 Demidof ditto | 20 | 33 Bezborodko ditto | 15 | 19 Medico-chirurgical academies of | | Moscow and Vilna | 94 | 797 Pedagogic institute of St. Petersburg | 43 | 68

According to the same report the Russian empire possessed at the close of the year 1840, 3230 establishments under the superior direction of the ministry of public instruction, and containing 103,450 pupils.

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