rder of things." And he would explain his system of "stability." He
would advocate a return to the normalcy of the good old days before
the war, when everybody was happy and nobody talked nonsense about
"everybody being as good as everybody else." In this attitude he was
entirely sincere and as he was an able man of great strength of will
and a tremendous power of persuasion, he was one of the most dangerous
enemies of the Revolutionary ideas. He did not die until the year 1859,
and he therefore lived long enough to see the complete failure of all
his policies when they were swept aside by the revolution of the year
1848. He then found himself the most hated man of Europe and more than
once ran the risk of being lynched by angry crowds of outraged citizens.
But until the very last, he remained steadfast in his belief that he had
done the right thing.

He had always been convinced that people preferred peace to liberty and
he had tried to give them what was best for them. And in all fairness,
it ought to be said that his efforts to establish universal peace were
fairly successful. The great powers did not fly at each other's throat
for almost forty years, indeed not until the Crimean war between Russia
and England, France and Italy and Turkey, in the year 1854. That means a
record for the European continent.

The third hero of this waltzing congress was the Emperor Alexander.
He had been brought up at the court of his grand-mother, the famous
Catherine the Great. Between the lessons of this shrewd old woman, who
taught him to regard the glory of Russia as the most important thing in
life, and those of his private tutor, a Swiss admirer of Voltaire and
Rousseau, who filled his mind with a general love of humanity, the boy
grew up to be a strange mixture of a selfish tyrant and a sentimental
revolutionist. He had suffered great indignities during the life of
his crazy father, Paul I. He had been obliged to wit-ness the wholesale
slaughter of the Napoleonic battle-fields. Then the tide had turned. His
armies had won the day for the Allies. Russia had become the saviour of
Europe and the Tsar of this mighty people was acclaimed as a half-god
who would cure the world of its many ills.

But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women as
Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the
strange game of diplomacy. He was vain (who would not be under the
circumstances?) and loved to hear the applau