speak French perfectly, are quite incapable of speaking, or at least of writing, in the language of their grandchildren.
Since the time of Catherine, a series of generations living in the Parisian elegance and luxury of the days of Louis XV., of the Empire, and the Restoration, have suffered with the French all their revolutionary shocks, shared in all their aspirations, been influenced by all their literature, sympathized in all their theories of administration and political economy;—and these do not even trouble themselves to know how a muzhik of the provinces lives, or what he has to endure. These political economists do not even know how Russian wheat is raised, which Pushkin declares to grow differently from the English wheat.
So the people, left to themselves, merely vegetated, and developed according to the obscure laws of their oriental nature. We can imagine what disorder would arise in a nation so formed and divided.
In France, historical events have gradually formed a middle class; a natural connecting link between the two extremes of society. In Russia this middle class did not exist, and is still wanting, there being nothing to fill the intervening space. The whole depth of the abyss was realized by those Russians who became enlightened enough to understand the state of their country during the latter years of the reign of Alexander I.
