Note 111 — THE EMPEROR ALEXANDER I. AND V. N. KARAZIN⁠[79]

The Old Believers of the English school, bound by their creed to preserve all the historical gains of the ages, even indeed when they are pernicious, do not agree with this. They think that every sort of right, however wrongly obtained, must be preserved and others grafted on to it. For instance, instead of depriving the nobles of the right of flogging and beating the peasants, the same right should be given to the peasants. In old days they used to say it would be a good thing to promote all the common people into the fourteenth⁠[*] grade so that they should not be beaten; would it not be better to promote them straight away to being captains in the guards or hereditary noblemen, since heredity among us is reckoned in opposite direction?⁠[†] Yet the Ukrainians in the seventeenth century did not reason like that when there was a plan of ennobling them, and a plan not suggested by bookish scholars, but by the brilliant, gorgeous, exuberant nobility of Poland. They thought it better to remain Cossacks. There is something like that Cossack principle in organic development generally (which our doctrinaires are very fond of taking as an example). One side of the organism can under certain circumstances develop specially and get the upper hand, always to the detriment of all the rest. In itself the organ may be well developed, but it becomes a deformity which one cannot get rid of in the organism by artificially developing the remaining parts to the point of grotesqueness.

This reminds us of a remarkable instance from the religious-surgical practice of Prince Hohenlohe. Prince Hohenlohe was one of the last mortals endowed with miraculous powers. This was in those blessed days of our century when everything feudal and clerical was rising up again with powder and incense on the ruins of the French Revolution. The Prince was summoned to an invalid, one of whose legs was too short; his relations had failed to grasp that in fact the other leg was too long. The miracle-working Prince set to work praying ... the leg grew, but the Prince did not know where to stop and prayed too excessively—the short leg overdid it—how annoying; he began praying for the other and then that outdid the other—he went back to the first ... and it ended in the Prince leaving his patient still with legs of unequal length and both of them as long as living stilts.—(Author’s Note.)

[*] The fourteenth is the lowest grade in the government table of ranks.

[†] In Russia an ‘hereditary nobleman’ (so-called) is one who has not inherited his noble rank, but whose heirs will inherit it. (Translator’s Notes.)