On September the 14th, 1812, the French troops defiled through the streets of Moscow singing the Marseillaise, and Napoleon established himself in the ancient palace of the Ivans within the walls of the Kremlin.  The torches had been distributed, and were in the hands of the Muscovites.  The stores of brandy, and boats loaded with alcohol, were simultaneously ignited, and a fierce conflagration like a sea of flame raged below the Kremlin.  Napoleon, compelled to force his way through these volcanic fires himself, narrowly escaped.

For five days they continued, devouring supplies and everything upon which the army had depended for shelter and subsistence.  For thirty-five days more they waited among the blackened ruins.  All was over with the French conquest.  The troops were eating their horses, and thousands were already perishing with hunger.  Then the elements began to fight for Russia—­the snow-flakes came, then the bitter polar winds, cutting like a razor; and a winding sheet of snow enveloped the land.  On the 13th of October, after lighting a mine under the Kremlin, with sullen rage the French troops marched out of Moscow.  The Great Tower of Ivan erected by Boris was cracked and some portions of palaces and gateways destroyed by this vicious and useless act of revenge.

Then, instead of marching upon St. Petersburg as he had expected, Napoleon escaped alone to the frontier, leaving his perishing wreck of an army to get back as it could.  The peasantry, the mushiks, whom the Russians had feared to trust—­infuriated by the destruction of their homes, committed awful atrocities upon the starving, freezing soldiers, who, maddened by cold and hunger and by the singing in their ears of the rarefied air, many of them leaped into the bivouac fires.  It was a colossal tragedy.  Of the 678,000 soldiers only 80,000 ever returned.

The extinction of the grand army of invasion was complete.  But in the following year, with another great army, the indomitable Napoleon was conducting a campaign in Germany which ended with the final defeat at Leipzig—­then the march upon Paris—­and in March, 1814, Alexander at the head of the Allies was in the French capital, dictating the terms of surrender.  This young man had played the most brilliant part in the great drama of Liberation.  He was hailed as a Deliverer, and exerted a more powerful influence than any of the other sovereigns, in the long period required for rearranging Europe after the passing of Napoleon—­the disturber of the peace of the world.

In 1809 Sweden had surrendered to Russia Finland, which had belonged to that country for six centuries.  The kindly-intentioned Alexander conceded to the Finns many privileges similar to those enjoyed by Poland, which until recent years have not been seriously interfered with.  He guaranteed to them a Diet, a separate army, and the continuance of their own language and customs.  A ukase just issued by the present emperor seriously invades these privileges, and a forcible Russification of Finland threatens to bring a wave of Finnish emigration to America (1899).