The quiet precincts of the Russian _intelligenzia_, who, in the retirement of their homes, ventured to dream of a better political and social order, were invaded by political detectives who snatched thence numerous victims for the scaffold, the galleys, and conscription.

Such were the contrivances employed during the last years of pre-reformatory Russia to hold together the old order of things in the land of officialdom and serfdom, in that Russia which the poet Khomyakov, though patriot and Slavophile, branded thus: [Footnote 1: Compare above, p.

21, n.

1.] Blackened in court with falsehood's blackness, And stained by the yoke of slavery, Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying, And ev'ry possible knavery.
But the full weight of "the yoke of slavery" and "falsehood's blackness," by which pre-reformatory Russia was marked, fell upon the shoulders of the most hapless section of Russian subjects, the Jews.

The tragic gloom of the end of Nicholas' reign finds its only parallel in Jewish annals in the beginning of the same reign.