Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: together. The policemen proceeded to remove their prisoner, a welcome prize at a moment when soldiers of such stature as Yanos were in great demand, and Muller, having reiterated hia threats of carrying away the whole family if the ransom were not forthcoming in a week, followed his retreating satellites, leaying the lately happy inmates of Jacob's invaded home a prey to dismay, agony, and confusion. CHAPTER VII, E accursed system of slavery which forms the fundamental principle of Russian government, spreads its hateful influence around it with an effect as deadly as that of the upas tree of the poets. Every relation of life, every blossom of the heart, feels its withering blight, and suffers from its unwholesome power. The leper may be healed of his leprosy, the plague- Btricken wretch may be cured of his disease, even the brand of crime may be effaced by virtuous deeds and tears of penitence, tut the blotch of Russian serfdom cljngs like a Burning canker to millions, wjiom deliberate wickedness and throned injustice have doomed to hopeless ages of degradation and of woe. Who can reflect on the cunningly devised cruelty, the legalized brutality of the system by which any savage or profligate, born a noble, can trample under foot the wounded hearts and outrage the dearest affections of hundreds and of thousands of innocent but helpless creatures, without feeling his pulse quicken with the generous glow of righteous indignation? Could any man, not a Muscovite, behold an honest, hospitable, and kind-hearted citizen such as Jacob Petrovich, whose only prime was to have seen the light in a peasant's cottage instead of a gilded palace, suddenly, at the whim of a master in every respect his slave's inferior, save in birth, dragged from the home his industry had earned, deprived o...