Military success abroad presupposes union at home, and union often means the sacrifice of the individual and his interests and rights. This common historical phenomenon now received a fresh illustration. Victory took away all the blessings conferred by defeat. The Poles were crushed, and with them the budding liberty of the Russians. The people and the press, in calling for the utter annihilation of the supposed enemy of their country, were unwittingly advocating their own doom--in extinguishing Poland, they extinguished the last hope of their country’s happiness. For the defeat of the Poles decided the struggle in favour of despotism, all schemes of constitutional reform were abandoned, and Alexander II.’s reign closed as Alexander I.’s had done: in a craven recantation of the principles which had distinguished its beginning. This backsliding created bitter disappointment in the hearts of all Russian friends of liberty, and drove the more desperate among them to the declaration of a war which culminated in the unfortunate monarch’s murder. ♦1881 March 13♦ The crime of the Nihilists, however, defeated its own object and ruined the cause it was meant to serve. At the very moment of his death the Czar was actually meditating a plan for some form of representative government, to begin with the convocation of an Assembly of Notables. The intention died with him. Henceforth the relations between the Government and the governed are more than ever marked by mutual distrust.[154] The assassination of the humane Emperor, far from weakening, strengthened the hands of the champions of autocracy and intolerance, and these champions were reinforced by the advocates of Nationalism or Panslavism--a movement which, like Nihilism, derives its theories from modern Teutonic speculation, but applies them after a primitive fashion purely Russian.