olish race of the nation with great military monarchies in armies
and navies, which occupies the energies of the country, rather than a
development of national resources in commerce, agriculture, and the
useful arts.

AUTHORITIES.

Alison's History of Europe; Lives of Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi; Fyffe's
Modern Europe; Mackenzie's History of the Nineteenth Century; Biography
of Marshal Radetsky; Annual Register; Biography of Charles Albert;
Ellesmere, as quoted by Alison; Memoirs of Prince Metternich; Carlo
Botta's History of Italy.

CZAR NICHOLAS.

1796-1855.

THE CRIMEAN WAR.

For centuries before the Russian empire was consolidated by the wisdom,
the enterprise, and the conquests of Peter the Great, the Russians cast
longing eyes on Constantinople as the prize most precious and most
coveted in their sight.

From Constantinople, the capital of the Greek empire when the Turks were
a wandering and unknown Tartar tribe in the northern part of Asia, had
come the religion that was embraced by the ancient czars and the
Slavonic races which they ruled. To this Greek form of Christianity the
Russians were devotedly attached. They were semi-barbarians, and yet
bigoted Christians. In the course of centuries their priests came to
possess immense power,--social and political, as well as ecclesiastical.
The Patriarch of Moscow was the second personage of the empire, and the
third dignitary in the Greek Church. Religious forms and dogmas bound
the Russians with the Greek population of the Turkish empire in the
strongest ties of sympathy and interest, even when that empire was in
the height of its power. To get possession of those principalities under
Turkish dominion in which the Greek faith was the prevailing religion
had been the ambition of all the czars who reigned either at Moscow or
at St. Petersburg. They aimed at a protectorate over the Christian
subjects of the Porte in Eastern Europe; and the city where reigned the
first Christian emperor of the old Roman world was not only sacred in
their eyes, and had a religious prestige next to that of Jerusalem, but
was looked upon as their future and certain possession,--to be obtained,
however, only by bitter and sanguinary wars.

Turkey, in a religious point of view, was the certain and inflexible
enemy of Russia,--so handed down in all the traditions and teachings of
centuries. To erect again on the lofty dome of St. Sophia the cross,
which had been torn down by M