in October, 1820, he met Metternich at the Conference of Troppau. "So we are at one, Prince," he said at the famous interview in the inn parlour. "You have correctly judged the state of affairs. I deplore the waste of time, which we must try to repair. I am here without any fixed ideas; without any plan; but I bring you a firm and unalterable resolution. It is for your Emperor to use it as he wills."

His conversion was assured when, a few days later, the news reached him from St. Petersburg of a mutiny in the Semyonovski regiment of the Guard. This outbreak, provoked by the tyranny of a brutal Prussian colonel, had really no political significance; but its diplomatic consequences-as Gentz wrote exultinglywere immense. The regiment had been on guard at the palace on the night of Paul's murder; it had been the first to acclaim Alexander as Emperor; and it had ever since been distinguished by his special favour. In Alexander's mind, obsessed by the fear of sharing his father's fate, the mutiny therefore assumed a portentous significance. His disordered imagination saw in it a judgment upon him for attempting to come to terms with the demon of revolution. Henceforth there must be no compromise; and, Metternich being at hand to reinforce his fears, his ideal of the Holy Alliance, never abandoned, took new shape. In earlier days he had declared that the grant of Liberal constitutions was the logical outcome of its principles. It was now to be a league of Powers pledged to the sacred task of suppressing revolution wherever it might break out.

This principle inspired the Troppau Protocol, which asserted the right of the European Alliance to intervene in the internal affairs of States for the purpose of restoring legitimate authority. The Protocol was shelved owing to the protests of Great Britain; but the principle was reasserted at the adjourned conference at Laibach, in the spring of 1821, in justification of the Austrian intervention in Naples and Piedmont. The resulting prospect of a breach between Great Britain and the Alliance was averted for a while by the outbreak of the Greek insurrection. It was to the interests of both England and Austria to prevent Alexander from yielding to the clamour of his people and marching to the assistance of Orthodox Church Christians in revolt against the infidel; and for this purpose the ideal of the Holy Alliance had its uses even for Castlereagh. He adjured the Tsar not to

belie his mission as the world's peacemaker by again plunging Europe into war, while Metternich urged upon him that the Greeks were just ordinary rebels against legitimate authority. Alexander listened and was convinced. It was not till after his death that Holy Russia went on crusade against the Turks.

Meanwhile, Alexander's grandiose imagination had projected the influence of the Holy Alliance over more distant spheres. He had watched with growing concern the successful revolt of the Spanish American colonies, which threatened to subdue a whole hemisphere to subversive principles. The question of European intervention had been raised at Aix-la-Chapelle only to be dropped; and Great Britain had since made it perfectly clear that in no circumstances would she agree to such intervention. Alexander, however, clung obstinately to the idea. He asserted his own position as an American Power by the ukaz of September 21, 1821, which declared all the coast-lands of North America, as far south as 51 degrees of latitude, to be Russian territory. This claim was successfully resisted by Great Britain and the United States. But it had revealed the scope of the Tsar's ambitions. The principles of the Holy Alliance were clearly of ominous import for the New World as well as for the Old.

It was this which gave their epoch-making importance to the proceedings of the Congress of Verona in 1822. The main question discussed was that of the intervention of France in Spain, for the purpose of restoring the absolute authority of King Ferdinand VII; but behind this lay the larger question of the destiny of the former over-seas Empire of Spain. Alexander was very conscious of this. He was bitterly disappointed that, owing to the uncompromisingly negative attitude of Great Britain, the intervention in Spain had not been made as European as possible; for when, in 1823, the French crossed the Bidassoa they were backed only by the moral support of the three autocratic Powers.

Alexander then turned from Europe to America, and tried to strengthen the shaky edifice of the Holy Alliance by enlisting the support of the United States. He first informed the American Government, through his Minister at Washington, that in no circumstances would he ever recognize the de facto Governments of the Latin-American Republics; and this unpromising overture was followed up by a long despatch, in which Count Nesselrode

revealed to the unsympathetic eye of the Secretary of State the Tsar's vision of the Holy Alliance as "a new political system," based on "the power of union and concord," and directed only against "a despotism too often disguised by the errors of theorists or by the bad faith of men of criminal designs."

The idea of drawing the United States into the councils of Europe was not a new one it had been mooted at Aix-laChapelle in 1818; and President Monroe had shown himself not altogether averse from it. But circumstances had changed. The presence of the French in Spain, together with the intrigues of their agents in Latin-America, pointed to some plan for establishing an empire, or at least a paramount influence, in the New World. Repeated efforts to draw the affairs of LatinAmerica into discussion at conferences of the Powers emphasised the danger; and Canning, who had succeeded Castlereagh at the Foreign Office on the eve of the Congress of Verona, determined to forestall it. He proposed to Richard Rush, the American minister in London, that Great Britain and the United States should take up a joint attitude which would make any European intervention in the Americas impossible. This suggestion, together with the advances made by Alexander, determined the policy of the American Cabinet. The idea of taking common action with Great Britain was indeed rejected; but the Tsar's blandishments were met by the famous message to Congress which formulated the Monroe Doctrine.

With this rebuff ends the story of Alexander's efforts to convert the Holy Alliance into a universal union of guarantee. The issue of Verona," as Canning exultingly wrote, had split the one and indivisible Alliance into its elements. The time for Areopagus and all that " had gone by; and the Russians, who— to quote Castlereagh-had been " by no means pleased to see their Emperor wandering about Europe," had henceforth the satisfaction of keeping him in their midst. At Verona, Alexander appeared for the last time in person at the council-table of the Powers.

The account of the last three years of Alexander's life, which were spent wholly in Russia, is perhaps the most absorbingly interesting part of this last volume of M. Waliszewski's work, as it is certainly the part which contributes most to our knowledge. It is the story of a soul's tragedy. Alexander's youth had been one of generous impulses. He had been, as his friend Adam

Czartoryski said, "under the spell of youth as yet scarce begun, which builds projects that extend out of sight into a future that has no end." The end was now near, and of the projects not one had been realised. The secret committee set up at the beginning of his reign to elaborate a constitution for Russia had ended in nothing. The plans for the codification of the Civil Law had broken down, naturally enough, since the materials for such a code formed "a sort of pandemonium, in which orders, counter-orders, contradictory decisions, even simple apothegms, all the manifestations of the sovereign will had accumulated for centuries and formed a mass--thirteen huge volumes for the reign of Alexander alone-which was continually and capriciously being added to from the same source of legislative power." Bentham himself, says M. Waliszewski, would have boggled at the task. This being the state of legislation, he adds, one may imagine what sort of justice corresponded to it. The judges were ill-paid, venal, and ignorant. As for justice, in 1825 those awaiting trial in the prisons numbered 127,000; and they had to wait long, in conditions which are thus described in a report presented by Baron Kampenhausen to the Emperor :

Men and women, persons of low and high degree, well and ill, assassins, notorious bandits and people arrested on mere suspicion, or charged only with having forgotten their pass-ports, or merely summoned as witnesses . . . all without distinction languished for six months or more, crowded into a narrow cell or in a subterranean dungeon.*

The picture painted of the administration in general is scarcely less appalling. Alexander's habit of “ taking back with one hand what he had given with the other " had led to an over-elaboration and overlapping of functions which left the limits of authority vague. In theory all power was concentrated in the hands of the autocrat; in practice every bureaucrat exercised an arbitrary authority. The organs of government, old and new--Imperial Council, Senate, Committee of Ministers-set up to exercise a centralised control, in effect exercised none, and served only to relieve the gang of officials of all responsibility, and—as one of the

*In 1814 the Quakers Allen and Grellet visited prisons in Russia and found fault only with the promiscuity of the sexes, reporting that the cells were clean and the food good. This, comments M. Waliszewski, is "an experience from which those politicians might profit who in our own day set out to explore the country of the Soviets."

Dekabrist conspirators wrote from prison to the Emperor Nicholas I-" to hide all the disorders from the sovereign and make him alone responsible in the eyes of the nation."

This system, or want of system, was buttressed by an elaborate organization of police and spies, and by a rigorous censorship. The latter, under the influence of Alexander's pietism, developed into a hypocritical persecution of all progressive thought, whether political or scientific. The examples of its activities given by M. Waliszewski are almost incredible. The chief censor, Magnitski, applied literally the rule laid down in the Act of the Holy Alliance, namely, that in the administration of their respective States the Sovereigns were "to take as their sole guide" the precepts of the holy religion of Christ. In this sense, for instance, he "purified" the University of Kazan, expelling many of the most promising professors and students and clearing the library of obnoxious books-including Grotius. The rector, in order to justify his own exemption from this proscription, felt it necessary to mingle his lectures on the higher mathematics with pious sentiments. He is said to have drawn the attention of his class to two triangles which, "with God's help," would be found to be equal to a third. This story, whether true or not, may serve to illustrate the sickening veneer of hypocrisy with which Alexander had overlaid the official life of Russia.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that the seeds scattered by the French Revolution took root and flourished in Russia. Deprived of all share in the government and of all opportunity for openly criticising it, educated or semi-educated Russians took refuge in plots and conspiracies. The campaigns abroad had brought the army into contact with Liberal ideas; and, in general, the conspicuous part played by Alexander in European affairs had stimulated the Russian imagination and opened it to a flood of new ideas from the West. The influence of these ideas was, of course, not wholly in one direction. Byron, for instance, might inspire the young Pushkin, as so many others, with revolutionary sentiment; but the historical romanticism of Scott inspired Karamzin to write, with the active sympathy and aid of the Emperor, his monumental "History of Russia," in which he glorified the Tsardom and gave an historical foundation to the national conception of Holy Russia. Later on, Pushkin