and hoped to partition Turkey with her, as his mother, Frederick, and Catherine had accomplished the first partition of Poland. In 1788 he accordingly declared war against the Sublime Porte. But he found that the Turks, in spite of the corruption of their government, were still no contemptible foes. His own army was demoralised by the misconduct of the aristocratic officers; disease decimated his troops; and the Emperor Joseph returned from the campaign of 1788 with the seeds of mortal illness in his system, but with his determination to pursue the war unabated. [Sidenote: Russia: Catherine.] [Sidenote: Poland.] Russia, the chosen ally of Joseph II., was in 1789 ruled by the Empress Catherine II. This great monarch, though by birth a princess of the petty German state of Anhalt-Zerbst, ranks with Peter the Great as a founder of the Russian Empire; more Russian than the Russians, she understood the importance of the development of her adopted country geographically towards the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the capacity of her people to support her in her enterprises. She was at this time sixty years of age, in full possession of her remarkable powers, and having ruled for twenty-seven years, she had fortified her authority by experience. Peter the Great had seen the absolute necessity that the Russian Empire should have access to the sea, and had built Saint Petersburg; Catherine had moved southward and extended her dominions to the Black Sea. She hoped to make the Baltic and the Black Sea Russian lakes, and on that account was the consistent and watchful enemy of Sweden and the Turks. Upon the western frontier of Russia lay Poland. The natural policy of Russia was to maintain and even to strengthen Poland as a buffer between Russia and the military powers of Austria and Prussia. But the extraordinary Constitution of Poland, which provided for the election of a powerless king, and recognised the right of civil war and the power of any nobleman to forbid any measure proposed at the Diet by the exercise of what was called the _liberum veto_, kept the unfortunate country in a state of anarchy, unable either to defend or to oppose. It might have been possible to reform the Constitution, and make the Poles an organised nation, but the neighbouring monarchs considered it easier to share the country amongst them, and had, under the guidance of Frederick the Great, carried out in 1772 the first partition, which excluded Poland from the sea, brought the borders of the three powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, nearer to each other, and caused Russia to become an European instead of essentially an Eastern monarchy. Catherine grasped the fact that in her present position Russia must intervene in European politics, owing to the condition of Poland, and decided to derive what benefit she could from this circumstance. In her internal government Catherine was one of the benevolent despots. The patroness of Diderot,