When the legislature assembled, two days after Christmas, and the Emperor opened its session with a state proportionate to his new dignity, his speech from the throne was not merely an enumeration of what France owed to the new dispensation,--the civil and other codes, prizes for the encouragement of letters, industry, and the arts, the achievement of splendid public works,--it was also a presage of war. He declared that Italy, like France, needed a definite organization; that Austria was recuperating her strength; that the King of Prussia was the friend of France. Turkey, however, he said, was pursuing with vacillation and timidity a policy foreign to her interests, and he dragged in an expression of his desire that the spirit of Catherine the Great should guide the councils of the Czar Alexander. "He will remember," said the Emperor, "that the friendship of France is a necessary counterpoise for him in the European balance.... Set far from her, he can neither touch her interests nor trouble her repose." These were clearly words of warning. They meant that Russia must abandon her new Oriental policy, forget the anxiety she felt about French control in Italy and Naples, and forbear to chafe under the limitations of her trade with England, necessitated by the closing of all harbors in western Europe to English commerce. The feeling arose, and at once became general, not only in France, but in Europe, that these words of the Emperor meant an appeal to force. The Revolution had claimed to have a world-wide mission in protecting the oppressed and establishing justice. The nations had felt a solemn awe when they saw this task intrusted to the greatest general of his day. But now in a twinkling all was changed; here was a new kind of monarch; not a king, but a king of kings; and headstrong, wilful, and selfish, just as kings were, with no more respect than they for the rights of man. The greatest general of Europe was now its most ambitious and ruthless sovereign. It was a powerful argument for the royalists of the Continent that their old kings, whom they knew, were better than this novel, unknown tyrant.