1848 IN EUROPE—­CRIMEAN WAR.

The Revolution of 1831 was only the mild precursor of the one which shook Europe to its foundations in 1848.  It had centers wherever there were patriots and aching hearts.  In Paris, Louis Philippe had fled at the sound of the word Republic, and when in Paris workmen were waving the national banner of Poland, with awakened hope, even that land was quivering with excitement.  In Vienna the Emperor Ferdinand, unable to meet the storm, abdicated in favor of his young nephew, Francis Joseph.  Hungary, obedient to the voice of her great patriot, Louis Kossuth, in April, 1849, declared itself free and independent.  It was the Hungarians who had offered the most encouragement and sympathy to the Poles in 1831; so Nicholas determined to make them feel the weight of his hand.  Upon the pretext that thousands of Polish exiles—­his subjects—­were in the ranks of the insurgents, a Russian army marched into Hungary.  By the following August the revolution was over—­thousands of Hungarian patriots had died for naught, thousands more had fled to Turkey, and still other thousands were suffering from Austrian vengeance administered by the terrible General Haynau.  Francis Joseph, that gentle and benign sovereign, who sits today upon the throne at Vienna, subjected Hungary to more cruelties than had been inflicted by Nicholas in Poland.  Not only were the germs of nationality destroyed—­the Constitution and the Diet abolished, the national language, church, and institutions effaced; but revolting cruelties and executions continued for years.  Kossuth, who with a few other leaders, was an exile and a prisoner in Asia Minor, was freed by the intervention of European sentiment in 1851.  The United States government then sent a frigate and conveyed him and his friends to America, where the great Hungarian thrilled the people by the magic of his eloquence in their own language, which he had mastered during his imprisonment by means of a Bible and a dictionary.

It was to Russia that Austria was indebted for a result so satisfactory.  The Emperor Nicholas returned to St. Petersburg, feeling that he had earned the everlasting gratitude of the young ruler Francis Joseph, little suspecting that he was before long to say of him that “his ingratitude astonished Europe.”

There can be no doubt that the Emperor Nicholas, while he was, in common with the other powers, professing to desire the preservation of Ottoman integrity, had secretly resolved not to leave the Eastern Question to posterity, but to crown his own reign by its solution in a way favorable to Russia.  His position was a very strong one.  By the Treaty of 1841 his headship as protector of Eastern Christendom had been acknowledged.  Austria was now bound to him irrevocably by the tie of gratitude, and Prussia by close family ties and by sympathy.  It was only necessary to win over England.  In 1853, in a series of private, informal interviews with the English ambassador, he