d Gogol, and Koltsof and Turguenief, whom they
hated, because their voice was the voice of the New Russia.
Turguenief, who with smothered sense of Russia's oppression was then
girding himself for his battle with serfdom, says: "My proof used to
come back to me from the censor half erased, and stained with red ink
like blood. Ah! they were painful times!" But in spite of all,
Russian genius was spreading its wings, and perhaps from this very
repression was to come that passionate intensity which makes it so
great.

CHAPTER XXII

1848 IN EUROPE--CRIMEAN WAR.

The Revolution of 1831 was only the mild precursor of the one which shook
Europe to its foundations in 1848. It had centers wherever there were
patriots and aching hearts. In Paris, Louis Philippe had fled at the
sound of the word Republic, and when in Paris workmen were waving the
national banner of Poland, with awakened hope, even that land was
quivering with excitement. In Vienna the Emperor Ferdinand, unable to
meet the storm, abdicated in favor of his young nephew, Francis Joseph.
Hungary, obedient to the voice of her great patriot, Louis Kossuth, in
April, 1849, declared itself free and independent. It was the Hungarians
who had offered the most encouragement and sympathy to the Poles in 1831;
so Nicholas determined to make them feel the weight of his hand. Upon
the pretext that thousands of Polish exiles--his subjects--were in the
ranks of the insurgents, a Russian army marched into Hungary. By the
following August the revolution was over--thousands of Hungarian patriots
had died for naught, thousands more had fled to Turkey, and still other
thousands were suffering from Austrian vengeance administered by the
terrible General Haynau. Francis Joseph, that gentle and benign
sovereign, who sits today upon the throne at Vienna, subjected Hungary to
more cruelties than had been inflicted by Nicholas in Poland. Not only
were the germs of nationality destroyed--the Constitution and the Diet
abolished, the national language, church, and institutions effaced; but
revolting cruelties and executions continued for years. Kossuth, who
with a few other leaders, was an exile and a prisoner in Asia Minor, was
freed by the intervention of European sentiment in 1851. The United
States government then sent a frigate and conveyed him and his friends to
America, where the great Hungarian thrilled the people by the magic of
his eloquence in their own language,