Between the conquests made in the Caucasus and the annexations on the Amoor or in Central Asia, Alexander II. bullied, and at last put down, by unspeakably cruel means,--even as did his predecessor,--the national aspirations of unhappy Poland. Like Nicholas, he kept the road to Siberia alive with the wretched convoys of unfortunate exiles. Even in the Baltic Provinces, whence the Russian Government draws so many able administrators, diplomatists, and military leaders, whose capacities might be employed in a better cause, he began a system of persecution against the German population, of so galling a nature that it threatened, in course of time, to alienate that very mainstay of the public administration. The special towns' charters of the Baltic Provinces were infringed. The German tongue, hitherto possessing full privileges, was threatened. A process of Russification was attempted; the superior civilized element being pushed and annoyed by the inferior and barbarous one. These acts of the earliest years of the reign of Alexander II. have to be kept in mind, in order to understand that humanitarian motives were not the ruling ones in the final adoption of the Serf Emancipation measure. On his death-bed, Nicholas is stated to have said to his son:-- "Thou hast two enemies--the nobility and the Poles. Emancipate the serfs; and do not allow the Poles any Constitution!" It is impossible, with the mystery which envelopes the last days of Nicholas, to know whether these words are authentic. At all events, Alexander did not give back to the Poles the Constitution they possessed until 1830. Nor did he grant a Constitution to the Russians either. He emancipated the serfs--but not before the principles which had actuated the Conspirators of 1817-25 once more began to show themselves among the upper strata of society; and in passing his measure, he mainly sought to deprive a restive nobility of some of its influence, and to take the wind out of the sails of those Liberal agitators who would have made the abolition of bondage the outcome of the establishment of a freely-chosen Legislature. When, finally, the Poles, counting upon a corresponding movement in Russia, resolved upon that heroic, though desperate, rising which by anticipation I alluded to in the last article, such fresh cruelties were practised by Alexander II. against the vanquished victims, that every human heart worthy of the name must shudder at the mere recollection of them. From those days, however, the Conspiratory Movement in Russia began to assume larger proportions. What I have said in the preceding pages, goes far to explain the violence by which that movement has latterly been characterized. V.