She it was who did what Peter planned, and by making use of Russians as her agents. Her statesmen, her generals, and her "favorites" were Russians; and it was after her character and purposes became known that the rulers of Western Europe were forced to the conclusion that a change of policy was inevitable. But for the occurrence of the French Revolution, that Anglo-French Alliance which has been regarded as one of the prodigies of our prodigy-creating age would have been anticipated by more than sixty years. By destroying Poland and humiliating Turkey, Catharine forever settled the character of the Russian Empire; and her successors were enabled to solidify her work in consequence of the course which events took after the overthrow of the old French monarchy. Russian support was highly bidden for by both those parties in Europe which were headed respectively by France and by England; and it is difficult to decide from which Russia most profited in those days, the friendship of England or the enmity of France. One thing was sufficiently clear,--and that was, that, when the war had been decided in favor of the reactionists, Russia was the greatest power in the world. In the autumn of 1815, a Russian army one hundred and sixty thousand strong was reviewed near Paris, a spectacle that must have caused the sovereigns and statesmen of the West to have some doubts as to the wisdom of their course in paying so very high a price for the overthrow of Napoleon. It was certain that the genie had broken from his confinement, and that, while he towered to the skies, his shadow lay upon the world. The hegemony which Russia held for almost forty years after that date justified the fears which then were expressed by reflecting men. It only remained to be seen whether the Russian sovereigns, proceeding in the spirit that had moved Peter and Catharine, would take those measures by which alone a _Russian People_ could be formed; and to that end, the abolition of serfdom was absolutely necessary: the masses of their subjects, the very population from which their victorious armies were conscribed, being in a certain sense slaves, a state of things that had no parallel in the condition of any European country.[A]