en checked by the Polish
insurrection, there was an enormous advance in everything making for
material prosperity. Railways and telegraph-wires, and an improved
postal service, connected all the great cities in the empire, so that
there was rapid and regular communication with each other and all the
world. Factories were springing up, mines were working, and trade and
production and arts and literature were all throbbing with a new life.

In 1871, at the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War, the Emperor
Alexander saw his uncle William the First crowned Emperor of a United
Germany at Paris. The approval and the friendship of Russia at this
crisis were essential to the new German Empire as well as to France.
Gortchakof, the Russian Chancellor, saw his opportunity. He intimated
to the Powers the intention of Russia to resume its privileges in the
Black Sea, and after a brief diplomatic correspondence the Powers
formally abrogated the neutralization of those waters; and Russia
commenced to rebuild her ruined forts and to re-establish her naval
power in the South.

There had commenced to exist those close ties between the Russian and
other reigning families which have made European diplomacy seem almost
like a family affair--although in reality exercising very little
influence upon it. Alexander himself was the son of one of these
alliances, and had married a German Princess of the house of Hesse. In
1866 his son Alexander married Princess Dagmar, daughter of Christian
IX., King of Denmark, and in 1874 he gave his daughter Marie in
marriage to Queen Victoria's second son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. It
was in the following year (1875) that Lord Beaconsfield took advantage
of a financial crisis in Turkey, and a financial stringency in Egypt,
to purchase of the Khedive his half-interest in the Suez Canal for the
sum of $20,000,000, which gave to England the ownership of nearly
nine-tenths of that important link in the waterway leading direct to
her empire in India.

During all the years since 1856, there was one subject which had been
constantly upper-most in the mind of England; and that one subject was
the one above all others which her Prime Minister tried to make people
forget. It was perfectly well known when one after another of the
Balkan states revolted against the Turk--first Herzegovina, then
Montenegro, then Bosnia--that they were suffering the cruelest
oppression, and that not one of the Sultan's promises