Education was the key, he told me, so this was not a simple defence of monarchy. A balance needed to be found between the reasonable decentralisation of authority and the decisive power that must rest centrally and with the Crown. That was his contention. He would, over time, increase the powers of the Duma, his parliament, but this needed to be done in step with educating the people.

Here’s what he said: ‘A man who has only ever had a sickle in his hand and never held a pen or read a written word is not in a position to elect a government, for that man has no idea of what a government is.’ I wrote that in my journal afterwards.

I wondered how many sickle-wielders he had discussed this with. For every John Adams, full of book learning, in 1776, there were a hundred farm boys who could neither read nor write – possibly a thousand – with, I believed, an equal entitlement to our rightly celebrated independence.

The Emperor set his hand down on the globe, across the Transcaucasus, and looked at Russia as though watching it from a great height, all of its people, all of its stories under his imperial gaze. ‘But before we educate Russia, we must feed it,’ he said. ‘People need food before they need parliaments.’

He lifted his hand from the globe and told me he still had the people with him. He pointed to two piles of letters on his desk, each bound by ribbon. There were other letters there also, lying open. There had been a third pile, evidently. These were letters from Russians, from towns and villages all about, pledging loyalty and seeking suppression of unrest with, he assured me, little liberal sentiment among them.

Nonetheless, he would be at the next sitting of the Duma in Petrograd, to speak at the opening and make all necessary remarks, seeing that as the responsibility of the Crown – to take an interest in the people’s body and be seen to take it.

He had visited the United States, the Emperor, when he himself was the Tsarevitch. That was the early 1890s, when I was in the Senate. We discussed that visit, which I remembered, though I had no direct involvement. There had been a famine in Russia at the time, and he played a role in the coordination of aid provided by the United States. He mentioned this to restate his gratitude. He had also, on that visit, negotiated financing for a Trans-Siberian railroad.

He went back to the globe at that point in our conversation and indicated Vladivostok, and the rail connection between the Pacific and where we stood. He placed his hand flat on the globe, upon the Pacific, thumb tip at Vladivostok, palm across the blue water, at least two of his fingers pointing below the pink of Canada in the direction of our western ports.

He was an astute man. I knew that then.