His difficulties began at once.  The chief Russian administrator, Dondukoff Korsakoff, had thrust his countrymen into all the important and lucrative posts, thereby leaving out in the cold the many Bulgarians, who, after working hard for the liberation of their land, now saw it transferred from the slovenly overlordship of the Turk to the masterful grip of the Muscovite.  The Principality heaved with discontent, and these feelings finally communicated themselves to the sympathetic nature of the Prince.  But duty and policy alike forbade him casting off the Russian influence.  No position could be more trying for a young man of chivalrous and ambitious nature, endowed with a strain of sensitiveness which he probably derived from his Polish mother.  He early set forth his feelings in a private letter to Prince Charles of Roumania:—­

Devoted with my whole heart to the Czar Alexander, I am anxious to do nothing that can be called anti-Russian.  Unfortunately the Russian officials have acted with the utmost want of tact; confusion prevails in every office, and peculation, thanks to Dondukoff’s decrees, is all but sanctioned.  I am daily confronted with the painful alternative of having to decide either to assent to the Russian demands or to be accused in Russia of ingratitude and of “injuring the most sacred feelings of the Bulgarians.”  My position is truly terrible.

The friction with Russia increased with time.  Early in the year 1880, Prince Alexander determined to go to St. Petersburg to appeal to the Czar in the hope of allaying the violence of the Panslavonic intriguers.  Matters improved for a time, but only because the Prince accepted the guidance of the Czar.  Thereafter he retained most of his pro-Russian Ministers, even though the second Legislative Assembly, elected in the spring of that year, was strongly Liberal and anti-Russian.  In April 1881 he acted on the advice of one of his Ministers, a Russian general named Ehrenroth, and carried matters with a high hand:  he dissolved the Assembly, suspended the constitution, encouraged his officials to browbeat the voters, and thereby gained a docile Chamber, which carried out his behests by decreeing a Septennate, or autocratic rule for seven years.  In order to prop up his miniature czardom, he now asked the new Emperor, Alexander III., to send him two Russian Generals.  His request was granted in the persons of Generals Soboleff and Kaulbars, who became Ministers of the Interior and for War; a third, General Tioharoff, being also added as Minister of Justice.

The triumph of Muscovite influence now seemed to be complete, until the trio just named usurped the functions of the Bulgarian Ministers and informed the Prince that they took their orders from the Czar, not from him.  Chafing at these self-imposed Russian bonds, the Prince now leant more on the moderate Liberals, headed by Karaveloff; and on the Muscovites intriguing in the same quarter, and with the troops, with a view