The Poles felt his gradual deterioration. Russian Poland was at first, with a show of generosity, converted into an autonomous kingdom under the Russian crown. Alexander was the king; though the Poles had their old flag with the white eagle. The Grand Duke Constantine was commander of the army; though it was a Polish army. An officer of Napoleon’s army was made Viceroy, and a general amnesty was granted. But Warsaw was far away, and the harsh Constantine and the Tsar’s more reactionary ministers ruled it. The Diet was soon left in abeyance, and the promises of reform unfulfilled. The Poles angrily muttered that they had been duped, and secret societies spread, with a result which we shall see later. But we are passing to Alexander’s last phase, the phase of reaction, without having considered the reforms which came of his early humanitarian zeal. He had, we saw, been educated (in part) by humanitarians like La Harpe, imbued with the French spirit. Catherine herself had, as I said, leaned to reaction, and let her reforms droop, in her later years; and the interlude of Paul’s reign had been thoroughly bad. Yet Alexander came to the throne with a magnificent resolution to reform Russia. He was dreamy by temperament, and he had neither the positive knowledge nor the quality of painstaking perseverance which were necessary to construct a detailed scheme of reform for so comprehensively backward a country. However, he appointed a Committee of Reform, and he followed its deliberations with keen interest. During many years, especially from 1807-1812, Alexander had for this work the splendid ability and devotion of a remarkably enlightened and democratic statesman named Speranski. Professor Kornilov regards him as “one of the most remarkable statesmen in all Russian history.” He was the son of an obscure priest, a child of the people; and his large mind and great capacity for detail enabled him to give definite shape to the Tsar’s vague dreams of justice. He not only studied the new democratic constitution of the United States, of which the Tsar obtained a copy from Washington, but he followed Napoleon’s constructive work with much sympathy and admiration. To Speranski the Tsar owed the great scheme of reform which at first he made some effort to impose upon Russia. It, unhappily, remained for the most part a paper-scheme. Years afterwards, in 1830, the rebellious Poles found a copy of Speranski’s liberal constitution and printed it, but Nicholas I emphatically suppressed it.