Anyone taking a survey of the earlier part of the reign of Alexander II. must see that the main object of his government was to foil the tendency towards the introduction of parliamentary institutions, which was sullenly but perceptibly making its way among the better educated section of the nation; that, with the view of attaining this reactionary end, he pursued the traditional despotic policy of approaching the lower classes on the one hand, and engaging the country in fresh warlike enterprise abroad on the other. Foiled in Europe by England and France, he throws his armies, after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris, with renewed fury upon the Tcherkess tribes. They had long barred the way of Russia towards Asia Minor and Persia, thereby insuring the safety of India from that side. Now Schamyl, the hoary-headed warrior-prophet, is compelled to surrender in his last mountain stronghold. From his lofty Alpine home, which is filled with the renown of his romantic deeds, he is carried a prisoner to St. Petersburg, there to be stared at by the crowd of decorated slaves of autocracy.
With this "pacification" of the Caucasus, the Czar obtained the unimpeded use of the high-road leading into Asia Minor. He then struck a blow against the independent tribes on the eastern shore of the Caspian. With the Court of Teheran he entered into relations calculated to threaten Turkey with a double danger from the Asiatic side, in case of a renewal of war. Again, he enlarged his Empire, at the cost of China, by filching territories as extensive as some of the greatest European countries. In what once was Independent Turkestan, his armies overran one Khanate after the other, thus coming nearer and nearer to India from the north-west. There is a striking war-picture by Vereshagin, with a pyramid of skulls as its centre--a very Golgotha of the horrors of massacre; but Russian monarchs, in their ceaseless career of conquest, out-Tatar the Tatar in the fiendishness of their atrocities. Witness the order given by General Kaufmann, the pampered tool of Alexander II., in these Turkestan campaigns:--"_Kill all; spare no age, or sex!_" Witness also the death-dance that took place when his Majesty, the crowned head of Holy Russia, the magnanimous Champion of Religion and Humanity, made his victorious entry into Plevna,[48] carousing there jubilantly, whilst the Turkish wounded lay unattended in the town for fully two days--a helpless mass of men, dying in raving agony.