it was
opposed to Russian interests, and it was one of the main causes of the
Crimean War.

IX.

Under Alexander II. the alliance of the three reactionary empires of
Central Europe was welded even more firmly than under his predecessor.
Bismarck, during his tenure of the Prussian Embassy at Petersburg, was
the chosen favourite of the Russian Court, and if he had chosen could
have become a Minister of the Tsar. An understanding with Russia
became the chief dogma of his political creed, and it remained so
until the end. It was Bismarck's adherence to the Russian-Prussian
Alliance which was one of the causes of his dismissal.

Alexander II. did nothing to guard against the German peril. He might
have been the umpire of Central Europe, as Alexander I. had been fifty
years before. He demanded no compensation for the enormous accession
of power and territory which Germany had received through the
victorious wars of 1863, 1866, and 1870. He insisted on no guarantees.
When, after Sedan, Thiers came to St. Petersburg to obtain the
intervention of the Russian Empire, he was dismissed with empty words.
One year after Thiers's fruitless journey, Emperor William paid an
official visit to his nephew Alexander II., and the Tsar once more
proclaimed the indissoluble solidarity of Russia with Germany. Until
the end of his reign the German-Austrian-Russian Alliance, the famous
dynastic Alliance of the Three Emperors, remained the keystone of
European policy and the mainstay of Russian reaction.

X.

The influence of Germany at the Russian Court was strengthened by the
influence of Germany on the Russian bureaucracy. An agricultural
community without a middle class, Russia has had to recruit her Civil
Services almost entirely from the outside and mainly from Germany, and
more especially from the German Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia,
and Courland. Teutonic barons from those Baltic provinces have filled
the higher ranks of the Diplomatic Service and of the Civil Service
for a hundred and fifty years. The Russian Tsars found the German
barons far more serviceable tools than the Russian boiars. In a
previous age one Emperor after another had been removed by a
rebellious aristocracy. The highest nobles in the land had been
implicated in the Decabrist conspiracy at the end of Alexander I.'s
reign. Even under Alexander II. there were always a few members of the
nobility to be found as accomplices in the revolutionary plots. B