There is a well-known Latin proverb which says that the gods begin by depriving of their reason those whom they mean to destroy.
Never was its truth more forcibly illustrated than in the tragedy which brought about the fall of the autocratic system of government under which Russia had been suffering for centuries. Its last representative had incarnated in his person all the follies, the crimes, the mistakes, and the ruthless cruelty of his predecessors. Unlike them, he had not known how to temper them by personal authority or personal sympathy. He was an effeminate, degenerate descendant of strong ancestors; the whole atavism of a doomed race seemed to have become embodied in his weak individuality. If outside catastrophes had not occurred in his reign, it is still likely that he would have been compelled by a revolution of some kind or other to step back into an obscurity out of which he ought never to have emerged, because he was most certainly not able to bear the rays of the “fierce light which beats upon a throne.” It is, however, possible that none of those supreme calamities which destroy the independence and self-respect of nations as well as of individuals would have been connected with his name and history. But destiny condemned him to remain forever, in the annals of the world, a living proof of the degeneracy which threatens all royal houses who do not possess sufficient energy to stand in perfect union with their people whenever a trial of some kind comes to threaten their mutual existence.
It would have been hard enough to be branded by the centuries to come as the last of the Romanoffs and as an unworthy Heir of Peter the Great. It was worse than hard for Russia, even more than for Nicholas II., to have to realize that, through stupidity, weakness of character, and an exaggerated opinion of his own power and might, he had been the direct cause of the ruin of his country and the means of plunging it into an abyss of distress and of anarchy from which it will take the work of several generations to redeem it.
His wife was the instrument of his destruction. About this last point there cannot exist any doubt whatever. She had a character stronger than his and she could speak to him in the name of the son to whom they were both so completely devoted. She could also appeal to his religious and superstitious feelings, which, though not as exaggerated as her own and not quite so foolishly carried to extremes, were yet also devoid of sound common sense. They were connected with the conviction that he had a mission to perform in regard to the future of his subjects, and to their welfare both in this world and in the next. Nicholas II. had in his character something of the traits of Caligula and other Roman emperors--a mixture of cruelty and theatrical sentimentality combined with cowardice in presence of danger and indecision before immediate peril. He never knew what it meant to play the game, and he perished because he refused to fight it out on the day that he discovered his adversary held all the trumps.