THE coronation, in Moscow, of Nicholas II. more destructive of wealth and more fatal to life than many a pitched battle I witnessed, not as a special correspondent bound to telegraph columns of descriptive copy day by day, but as a resident ; and having time to chew the cud of reflection, I ask myself in how far does a demoniac possession by the passions of patriotism and loyalty, such as I have witnessed here in Russia, afflict also the inhabitants of the British Empire ?
I fear that the worship of rank, wealth, and especially of
royalty, in many English people amounts to an hypnotic influence, depriving them of reasoning power and of all sense of proportion. A curious instance of this occurred in a letter I received lately from a near relation of my own, who, a propos of this very coronation calamity, wrote : " The Moscow disaster has been very terrible to read about, and I feel so sorry for the Emperor and Empress." Which is as though when a house falls in, killing and maiming the members of several families, one's first thought were to feel pity for the ground landlord ! Yet it is a fair sample of the feeling expressed by many people.
A still more striking example of the same sentiment came
under my notice some years ago. Another near relative
of mine had an acquaintance, a Miss Wells. A Russian
lady, who pronounces English rather badly, came into her
room one day with the announcement, " Wales is dead ! " " What ? " cried my relation ; " the Prince of Wales is dead ? " and she burst into a flood of genuine tears for a man she had never spoken to, but cheered up promptly on discovering that it was only her friend Miss Wells who had departed this life.
Such 'loyalty' may have seemed suitable in the time of Edward the Black Prince (whose courage outweighed his cruelty in the eyes of his contemporaries), but it seems somewhat out of place when applied to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales.
Again, I recollect a Canadian clergyman who took my
father's duty and came to live at the parsonage for
some months, when I was a boy of nine, a couple of
years after the close of the Civil War in the United States. He was very friendly to me, and under his guidance my mind expanded ; on politics, however (a subject to which he introduced me), the main point he made clear to my boyish perceptions was the terrible blunder committed by the English Government in not seizing the opportunity afforded by the American War. He pointed out that by joining the Confederate States a policy in which we should have been enthusiastically supported by both Canada and France we could have broken the United States in two, and the hege- mony of the English-speaking nations would have remained with England. I accepted this teaching with faith and enthusiasm, never asking what would have been the fate of the slaves, or what I should have gained personally by an arrangement which might have condemned North America to a militarism similar to that which has since then grown like a cancer on Europe. Nor did either he or I consider how the transaction would look from the standpoint of an Eternal that loveth righteousness.
I now, thanks to the teaching of Tolstoy, see the insanity
of attempting to guide the destinies of mankind on motives
of expediency which run counter to the laws of morality. We have not seen the ultimate results of England's non- intervention in that war, still less can we tell what would have resulted had she fought; but we may know that no aim can justify the use of evil means, and that hatred and bloodshed are evil whether we think they tend to " establish the empire " (which is not the Kingdom of God) or not.