Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/734

 556 General History of Europe Both the French and the English suffered great hardship and losses. Russia was, however, disheartened by the sufferings of her own soldiers, the inefficiency and corruption of her officials, and the final loss of the mighty fortress of Sebastopol. She saw, moreover, that her near neighbor, Austria, was about to join her enemies. The new Tsar, Alexander II, therefore, consented in 1856 to the terms of a treaty drawn up at Paris. This treaty recognized the independence of the Ottoman Em- pire and guaranteed its territorial integrity. The "Sublime Porte" was taken into the family of European powers, from which it had hitherto been excluded as a barbarous government, and the other powers agreed not to interfere further with the domestic affairs of Turkey. In short, Turkey was preserved and strength- ened by the intervention of the powers as a bulwark against Russian encroachment into the Balkan peninsula, but nothing was really done to reform the Turkish administration or to make the lot of the Christian subjects more secure. III. THE FREEING OF THE SERFS ; TERRORISM 1007. Accession of Alexander II (isss). Nicholas had died in the midst of the reverses of the Crimean War, leaving to his son, Alexander II, the responsibility of coming to terms with the enemy and then, if possible, strengthening Russia by reducing the political corruption and bribery which had been revealed by the war and by improving the lot of the people at large. 1008. Situation of the Russian Serfs. About nine tenths of all the agricultural land in the empire was in the hands of the nobility. Nearly one half of the Tsar's subjects were serfs whose bondage and wretched lives seemed to present an insurmountable barrier to general progress and prosperity. The landlord com- monly reserved a portion of his estate for himself and turned over to his serfs barely enough to enable them to keep body and soul together. They usually spent three days in the week cultivating their lord's fields. The serf was viewed as scarcely more than a beast of burden.