nflict with
Turkey, with which country he was almost immediately at war. Of course
no one suspected him of sentimental sympathy when he espoused the cause
of Greece in the picturesque struggle with the Turks which brought
Western Europe at last to her rescue. It was only a part of a much
larger plan, and when Nicholas had proclaimed himself the Protector of
the Orthodox Christians in the East, he had placed himself in a
relation to the Eastern Question which could be held by no other
sovereign in Europe; for persecuted Christians in the East were not
Catholic but Orthodox; and was not he the head of the Orthodox Church?
It was to secure this first move in the game of diplomacy that Russia
joined England and France, and placed the struggling little state of
Greece upon its feet in 1832.

But the conditions in Western Europe were unfavorable to the tranquil
pursuit of autocratic ends. Charles X. had presumed too far upon the
patient submission of the French people. In 1830 Paris was in a state
of insurrection; Charles, the last of the Bourbons, had abdicated; and
Louis Philippe, under a new liberal Constitution _approved by the
people_, was King of the French. The indignation of Nicholas at this
overturning was still greater when the epidemic of revolt spread to
Belgium and to Italy, and then leaped, as such epidemics will, across
the intervening space to Russian Poland. The surface calm in that
unhappy state ruled by the Grand Duke Constantine swiftly vanished and
revealed an entire people waiting for the day when, at any cost, they
might make one more stand for freedom. The plan was a desperate one.
It was to assassinate Constantine, who had relinquished a throne rather
than leave them; to induce Lithuania, their old ally, to join them; and
to create an independent Polish state which would bar the Russians from
entering Europe.

In 1831 the brief struggle was ended, and Europe had received the
historic announcement, "Order reigns at Warsaw." Not only Warsaw, but
Poland, was at the feet of the Emperor. Confiscations, imprisonments,
and banishments to Siberia were the least terrible of the punishments.
Every germ of a Polish nationality was destroyed--the army and the Diet
effaced, Russian systems of taxes, justice, and coinage, and the metric
system of weights and measures used in Russia were introduced,--the
Julian Calendar superseded the one adopted all over the world--the
University of Warsaw was carried to