their studies create new and ideal conditions, and build up with one hand while they were recklessly destroying with the other.  Their aims were the abolition of serfdom, the destruction of all existing institutions, and a perfect equality under a constitutional government.  They were definite and sweeping—­and so were the means for accomplishing them.  Their benign government was going to rest upon crime and violence.  We should call these men Nihilists now.  There were among them writers and thinkers, noble souls which, under the stress of oppression and sympathy, had gone astray.  They had failed, but they had proved that there were men in Russia capable of dying for an ideal.  When the cause had its martyrs it had become sacred—­and though it might sleep, it would not die.

The man sitting upon the throne of Russia now was not torn by conflicts between his ideals and inexorable circumstance.  His natural instincts and the conditions of his empire both pointed to the same simple course—­an unmitigated autocracy—­an absolute rule supported by military power.  Instead of opening wider the doors leading into Europe, he intended to close them, and if necessary even to lock them.  Instead of encouraging his people to be more European, he was going to be the champion of a new Pan-Slavism and to strive to intensify the Russian national traits.  The time had come for this great empire to turn its face away from the West and toward the East, where its true interests were.  Such a plan may not have been formulated by Nicholas, but such were the policies instinctively pursued from the beginning of his reign to its close.

Such an attitude naturally brought him at once into conflict with Turkey, with which country he was almost immediately at war.  Of course no one suspected him of sentimental sympathy when he espoused the cause of Greece in the picturesque struggle with the Turks which brought Western Europe at last to her rescue.  It was only a part of a much larger plan, and when Nicholas had proclaimed himself the Protector of the Orthodox Christians in the East, he had placed himself in a relation to the Eastern Question which could be held by no other sovereign in Europe; for persecuted Christians in the East were not Catholic but Orthodox; and was not he the head of the Orthodox Church?  It was to secure this first move in the game of diplomacy that Russia joined England and France, and placed the struggling little state of Greece upon its feet in 1832.

But the conditions in Western Europe were unfavorable to the tranquil pursuit of autocratic ends.  Charles X. had presumed too far upon the patient submission of the French people.  In 1830 Paris was in a state of insurrection; Charles, the last of the Bourbons, had abdicated; and Louis Philippe, under a new liberal Constitution approved by the people, was King of the French.  The indignation of Nicholas at this overturning was still greater when the epidemic