d the Parliament because it supported the Press,
his days were numbered.

On the night of the 27th of July of the year 1830, a revolution took
place in Paris. On the 30th of the same month, the king fled to the
coast and set sail for England. In this way the "famous farce of fifteen
years" came to an end and the Bourbons were at last removed from the
throne of France. They were too hopelessly incompetent. France then
might have returned to a Republican form of government, but such a step
would not have been tolerated by Metternich.

The situation was dangerous enough. The spark of rebellion had leaped
beyond the French frontier and had set fire to another powder house
filled with national grievances. The new kingdom of the Netherlands
had not been a success. The Belgian and the Dutch people had nothing in
common and their king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of
William the Silent), while a hard worker and a good business man, was
too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep the peace among his
uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde of priests which had descended
upon France, had at once found its way into Belgium and whatever
Protestant William tried to do was howled down by large crowds of
excited citizens as a fresh attempt upon the "freedom of the Catholic
church." On the 25th of August there was a popular outbreak against the
Dutch authorities in Brussels. Two months later, the Belgians declared
themselves independent and elected Leopold of Coburg, the uncle of Queen
Victoria of England, to the throne. That was an excellent solution
of the difficulty. The two countries, which never ought to have been
united, parted their ways and thereafter lived in peace and harmony and
behaved like decent neighbours.

News in those days when there were only a few short railroads,
travelled slowly, but when the success of the French and the Belgian
revolutionists became known in Poland there was an immediate clash
between the Poles and their Russian rulers which led to a year of
terrible warfare and ended with a complete victory for the Russians who
"established order along the banks of the Vistula" in the well-known
Russian fashion Nicholas the first, who had succeeded his brother
Alexander in 1825, firmly believed in the Divine Right of his own
family, and the thousands of Polish refugees who had found shelter in
western Europe bore witness to the fact that the principles of the Holy
Alliance were still mor