PERCEVAL GIBBON SERGIUS WITTE 
 
 
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 One Tsar after another has had need of him, and to each one he has done good service. But the weakest of them all has overtaxed him, and today Sergius Yulievitch Witte, Count and Minister, is a man who has failed. His great work as a fiscal strategist, his dramatic achievements as a diplomatist, these avail him nothing, for they but buttressed the autocracy which he was called upon to save and could not. Whatsoever his claim to a place of honour in history, he knows, and knows with a sureness of ineffectual effort, of staled hope and sterile endeavour, that his greatest task was beyond him. 
 There was a deputation of working men that visited him in December of last year, when every issue in Russia was fogged with the miasma of revolt. He had been forced to hear them, and they filed into his vast room in the Winter Palace, where he has been allotted quarters, and took the chairs that were ranged for them opposite his desk. 
 
 
 
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 He sat in his place, his big head propped on a hand, and watched them as they came, with something of a frown of thoughtfulness. He was tall and massive as ever, with a fluff of ill-kept beard finishing his rugged, harsh face, whence the wonderful eyes looked out inscrutably; but he was not the purposeful man that had set out for America at the beginning of the year, with a mind already clenched for the fight of wits. There was a clouding of doubt upon him; he seemed to be groping for a clue to the convictions and activities of these men who should have been so plastic to his moulding, but who were not. He seemed to be wondering, guessing fearfully; he was not incisive, not direct, as of old. Indeed, in his attitude and the slowness of his speech there was something strangely suggestive of an appeal, of the deprecation of a man who has been taken off his guard and is held at a disadvantage. 
 The audience came to nothing; it was merely an incident in a series of negotiations, and presently the deputation went away. Each of them ducked his head in a habit of deference as he passed the great man, and Count Witte sat watching them go, nodding to each salute. There was still that wonder on his face, that weakness of doubt; it made me realise suddenly, as a thing not known before, that he was an old man, heavy with years. It spiced one's thoughts of him with pity, as for something fine and sturdy that has been mishandled and ill-used. Big and gross and bowed, he is a strong man and a great one, and here he is at his finish. 
 His commission to restore order in the country was given by the Tsar personally, soon after M. Witte had returned from his triumph over the Japanese plenipotentiaries in the United States.  
 
 
 
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 His career was then at its summit: the man who had started as a railroad official at Odessa was the first figure in Russia. The appointment had the more weight in that he was already unpopular with what is called the Court party--that group of highly-placed men and Grand Dukes who are able to use the Tsar directly, who create the atmosphere in which the autocrat moves and works. He has ever been the butt of intrigue, and it is easy to believe that his mission in America, and his success in it, did nothing to reconcile those who have always seen in his rise an encroachment on their particular preserves. But he was too much the strong man of the moment to be passed over when the present crisis commenced to obtrude its problems and difficulties; and when the nature of his work is examined, one sees plenty of reasons why those who have persistently intrigued against him, and used all the force of high station and royal birth to belittle his work, should have abstained from opposing his appointment. He was commissioned, accordingly, to restore order in Russia, to tranquilise the people with as little resort as possible to the traditional methods of reaction which are so unpopular with other Governments in Europe, and particularly without yielding one jot or tittle of the Imperial and autocratic privilege. He was to stay hungry stomachs with nothing more costly than words, to lighten the ship without the jettison of any of its burden. And he accepted the task. 
 It was--it is--herculean. To gauge it accurately one must discard the notion that the revolution in Russia is a matter of politics, that Continental socialism is its source and motive force, that dreams and ethical science are alone at stake.   
 
 
 
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 It is no froth on the surface of life, this revolution; it is not manifested in the local unrest, the limited riots, which are reported from day to day, whether in the streets of Moscow, the ancient capital of Russia, or in the little fevered towns of the provinces. No; it is a natural process of national evolution, the struggle of a great people to move up another stage in the development of the race. They are moving on the very lines on which the Anglo-Saxon stem has emerged from the Ancient British, save that the Russian has much more to hamper him and weigh him down. This revolution is the uprising of human beings against the falsity that men can be the owners of men, that enlightenment is for the few, and labour, service, and humility are the meed of the mass. This is Count Witte's difficulty. If only principles were in question, if it were a matter of the contagion of socialism, who, better than he, could answer the turbulent workmen and fog the dreary brains of the impatient peasants? But words will not avail here, and the only answer that will satisfy these importunates cannot be packed into careful phrases. He is a diplomatist lost among facts, a trafficker in words who is face to face with the brutality of unglozed actualities. It has broken him. 
 I heard a Russian speak of him in St Petersburg, having just returned from visiting him at his official quarters. " This business identifies him definitely with the reactionaries," he said, "and Witte by no means relishes that. It was always his pose to be a buffer. But this is the end. De Plehve went out in flame; Witte will gutter out like a foul wick." 
 Count Witte's personality is one which, like his work, leaves one doubtful of the man it shields. His is a presence that screens rather than reveals the man who wears it.  
 
 
 
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 He is fifty-seven years of age, and until recently he carried his years lightly. It is only of late days that they have burdened him, when his other loads oppressed him and a touch of paralysis came as an index to the fearful strain under which he carries on his work. But it was a great man who accepted this great charge, a robust veteran of an iron frame, who has never wasted tissue on the littlenesses of social life, who bears to this day the imprint of rough work when he was young. He is over six feet in height, and when he straightens from a stoop that he has acquired he is yet a big and bulky man. He squares a pair of shoulders as thick through and as well-padded as those of a blacksmith. And his grey head is massive and brooding; he is a figure of the rudest full-blooded force, slow in motion, incredibly ungainly in every action, with vast worn hands that swing athwartship as he walks. 
 He is almost contemptuously casual and careless in all matters that concern his attire and outward appearance. He has the completest, most unconscious disdain for these trifles, and his clothes hang on him fortuitously. But all this is the mere supplement to the face that crowns the whole. Hairy and hard, with a beard ill-kept and a moustache  au diable,  the same ruggedness pervades it that characterizes his every feature. It is stolid, direct, and deeply lined; there is nothing of compromise in the expression, no art of grace, no study in the cast of it. So looms some oppressive village elder; so stares the man who is given to blurting forth the obvious; and so looks Count Witte, who is neither. The head is remarkable in that it is quite flat behind, rising from the neck to the crown with no curve. And then, there are the eyes.   
 
 
 
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 They, and they alone, betray the fact that in this man there dwells a spirit not manifested in the grossness and crudeness of his aspect. Shrined under heavy brows, they are pale and indeterminate in colour, but lit with a spark that is eloquent enough. They are lambent, inscrutable, mesmeric; they are the eyes of an Oriental, wise with an infinite subtlety, discriminating pitilessly, discerning infallibly, probing without ruth or scruple to the core of each matter that invites them. They redeem the face and the person and set them at a discount; in them lives the real Sergius Witte, the artist in the statesman, the wolf or the weasel in the man, the genius in the artisan. If it were anything but living truths, immune from doubt and double-dealing, that he had now to handle, how these twin fires would go to the heart of the thing and grip at once upon its weakness. 
 There is an impression that Count Witte is of poor and lowly origin. In point of fact he comes of a family connected with several of the greatest houses in Russia. He was born at Tiflis, in the Caucasus, on the 17th June 1849, the son of Yuli Feodorevitch Witte, who was at that time Director of the Department of Agriculture of the Caucasus; and his mother was a daughter of the noble house of Fadeyeff, a family which has long been distinguished for the military leaders it has produced, and for two generals in particular, whose writings on the trade of war have achieved some authority. She was also niece to the Princes Dolgourouki, those strangely ineffectual men who have lacked in their time no talent save that of thoroughness.   
 
 
 
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 Among other folk with whom Count Witte is connected there is Madame Hahn, who has been acclaimed as the Russian Georges Sand; Madame Zhelikhovsky, a graceful and popular writer, who had a considerable vogue in her day; and Madame Blavatsky, of theosophical notoriety. In short, he was of a family of which every branch has its man or woman of parts, though, besides himself, not one has captured a more than national renown: he is the only one of them who became great in the cosmopolitan sense. 
 His early education was on conventional lines. He was not one of those fortunate heirs who are aimed high by ambitious parents, and his progress in fame and fortune owes nothing to either protection or influence. His first school was in his native city, where nothing especial is remembered of him. While he was yet a boy his father was appointed to a post at Kishineff, and there he entered the Gymnasium. It is said that he was distinguished at this establishment by his taste for mathematics and a certain resoluteness of character, but no story takes account of him till, in 1866, he entered the New Russian University at Odessa. 
 During what corresponds to his undergraduate days he first showed the leaning towards journalism which he retained till he had reached an official position too high to be reconciled with a taste so questionable. The Russian student to this day writes for papers as the English schoolboy smokes cigarettes; 'tis a symptom of his growth. Sergius Witte had his immature phases like other men: there are extant articles of his embodying a philosophy which he would be sorry to own nowadays. One was on the moral aspect of the autocracy; it concerned itself mainly, however, with the immorality of that system.  
 
 
 
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 I am no judge of the tone in which it is written,--whether it bear the imprint of sincere dissatisfaction with the principle of government in Russia or not,--but it was one of several which he fathered, and therefore seems to justify one in assuming that Witte is not of those who have upheld the autocracy as the result of inborn convictions. He was not suckled in that creed outworn, so to speak; he has found it for himself and accepted it upon trial. 
 Long before he took his degree he had joined with M. Asmidoff to found 'The Odessa New Russian Telegraph,' and a long letter in one of its earliest numbers, which advances the dogma that a law is not morally binding on those who have not assented to the making of it, is attributed to him. These are but trifles; their bearing is on the fact that Witte of the early days was by no means the sure source of the great Minister of the 'Nineties or the diplomat of yesterday. They are the product of subsequent influences and opportunities. He left the University in 1870, with a degree as Candidate of the Physico-Mathematical Faculty, and at once entered the service of the South-Western Railway. 
 He was an admirable railwayman. Indeed, he had chosen the work because it appealed peculiarly to his taste for mechanics, while it also gave scope to his mathematical ability. Though he was naturally in the clerkly branch of the concern, he spared no pains to make himself an adept in every department of railroading which was accessible to him. He learned to drive an engine, to lay a rail, to handle a signal-lever; and :M. Boutchok, the engineer, who was in the employ of the line at that time, has since told how he remembers young Witte in a labourer's blouse tolling as a volunteer hand in a breakdown gang.  
 
 
 
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 In short, he seems to have brought to this part of his life an enthusiasm for work--and particularly for physical work--which rather endears him to one's thoughts. He was boyish then, at any rate, with a boy's delight in the process that shows an immediate result, the effect of which is at once visible to its author, and he has never been boyish since. His enthusiasm and industry brought their sure reward, and promotion was rapid for this fervid worker. When the Turko-Russian War broke out, he was Chief Superintendent of the line, and well equipped to take occasion by the hand and profit by this, the first of his great opportunities. He was able to so facilitate transport of troops and munitions that he drew attention in the highest quarters. Here was first exhibited that contempt for formalism, for red tape and its concomitants, which has always characterized him; and he so overrode the neolithic order of things which then paralysed the railways generally, that he was at one time in danger of disgrace for the flattest disobedience of express orders. He side-tracked a hoary general and his decorative stair for two days and a night in order to let the guns get down to the front unhindered. There was a hideous fuss about it, but the people at headquarters had already perceived how Witte was smoothing the way of the army, and it came to nothing. 
 He had various experiences subsequently, and was finally rewarded with the post of Director of the whole Southern system of railways, which was then worked from Kieff. Here he made his first powerful friend in M. Vishnegradsky who soon afterwards became Minister of Finance.  
 
 
 
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 On the 30th August 1892, on his retirement through illness, Witte was appointed to succeed him by the Tsar Alexander III. He was then only forty-three years of age. 
 When he had been appointed, Alexander is reported to have talked characteristically on the subject with one of his brothers. 
 "Do you really think that Witte resembles me?" he asked, for it was commonly said that this was the case. The Grand Duke nodded. "H'm," pondered the Emperor. "Well, in that case, he won't waste any time before his mirror." 
 It cannot serve any purpose to enter in this place upon a detail of M. Witte's career as Minister of Finance. But a little must be said. He had now entered upon his later mental phase, when he allied himself definitely with the ruling party, while claiming to be an official of the Tsar, devoted to his master, who yet had the cause of the people at heart. He had newly become an extreme Protectionist, and was the author of a monograph urging the imposition of a tight tariff in order to create native industries and make Russia a self-sufficing economic unit. As Minister he embarked at once on a tariff war with Germany, which led to the suspension of all trade between the two countries, and proceeded to open out the work which has since been recognized as his greatest achievement. This consisted in the establishment of a gold standard, of a State liquor monopoly, and in the industrialisation of the country. The second of these is the most interesting, for neither of the other two is quite free from the stigma of merely partial success. The monopoly has certainly not lacked profit to vindicate it, for in 1900 the State netted a return of 190,490,644 roubles, and two years later the profit was estimated at 250,000,000 roubles. 
   
 
 
 
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 It is as Minister of Finance, therefore, that most records deal with him, and during the whole of his service in this capacity, the highest in the State under the Tsar, he meddled little with general politics in the bulk, where they did not touch his own schemes. He never sought social success; but he was careful to keep the regard of the people by an occasional activity against irritant policies. He took sides with the Finns, the students, and the dissenters, and was consistently and openly hostile to foreign adventures. For instance, it is well known that he wrought to the utmost of his power to secure the evacuation of Manchuria, and so to avert the war with Japan, which he afterwards did so much to repair. But the taint of the reactionary never left him. Even when he was doing most to keep the regard of the people, when he was actually compromising himself at Court by his open advocacy of methods less drastic than those which, in Russia, are conventional when the suppression of disorder or the elimination of a disturbing element are concerned, he could seek the aid of Constantin Pobiedonostzeff to shut down a newspaper which criticized him too freely. He was never bound by principle--never the bondman of a single creed. One would think he were a sceptic where faith in human kind is concerned, so cynical is the instability which he manifests when he has only men and women to deal with. 
 He surrendered his trust as Minister of Finance with all honour. It has never been said of him, as it is said of most men in Russia who have the fingering of public money, that he stole all he could whenever he could.   
 
 
 
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 There are no definite charges against him of corruption and self -seeking; and this is as much as to say that he has, for an official Russian, a good name for honesty. But somehow he has never inspired confidence. What one man may fail to observe a crowd of men sees at once, and the people of Russia have never been deceived into placing their trust or their hopes in Count Witte. He has not impinged on their consciousness; that flavour of insincerity, of calculation, of deference to the expedient, has betrayed him. He rings untrue, they say, and they will have none of him, now that he needs them as he never needed them before. 
 So now he stands alone, hated of the Court party, loathed and despised by all those to whose class he has aspired, with only the weak, flaccid Tsar to stand between him and their enmity, and cast off by the people. He is a man dependent on himself; the faculties that brought him forth from the ranks in the first place, the indomitable will, the brisk and brusque strength of personality, these remain his chief stand-by at this hour. When the revolution commenced the leaders of the people had hopes of him, for it was evident he had not made up his mind as to which side should have his best aid. He began by flickering indeterminately; he was reluctant to commit himself whether as a friend to the reformers or a convinced reactionary. But when they began to move openly, to flout authority, to answer the first signs of repressive action with great strikes that left the authorities helpless, his hand was forced. For him, then, a declaration was necessary, and he threw in his lot with the Tsar. There was pluck in it too, for this old craftsman must have known well enough that in so doing he courted the last memorable failure that should overshadow all his foregoing victories. 
   
 
 
 
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 In November came the visitation of the slight paralysis of which I have spoken. It took him with the brutal suddenness of murder. He was leaving his desk at mid-day when the thing struck him down as though he had been bludgeoned. Two days later he was back at his work, an old man, tenacious, game as a ferret, but with a weakness now to fight on the side of his enemies. How a man's errors dog him! All his life he had had no mercy on personal weakness, on the lame soul that craved a. helping hand, on the poor thing that sought the aid of friends. And now there was none for him. Yet, I think, if I were one of those who have the guidance of this revolution in charge, I would walk warily yet when I came to deal with Count Witte. I would place no hope in his weakness and his discouragement; for this is one of those men to whom the feeble flesh and its flaws are but a trumpery fetter. Those eyes are yet brimming with the fire of the indomitable soul within. There is still a potency that can be dangerous. 
 When one of the great strikes left St Petersburg's streets unlighted, and they turned the Admiralty searchlight on the Winter Palace every night, that Count Witte might not be blown up in the darkness, he came once to his window and looked up along the quivering beam of light that deluged the Palace with radiance. About him the city hummed uneasily, pulsing with the troubles of its people. He smiled at the ray and spoke to one who stood with him. 
 "They seem to think," he said, "that I would not as willingly die in the dark as in the light." 
   
 
 
 Publication Date: January 2nd 2015 https://www.bookrix.com/-mk496e398f1e345