Yet, though Peter fought so well and thought so well, he made some mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses.  For in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme lack—­lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.  Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall—­“What use of so many lawyers?  I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;” or when at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.

Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an army to learn his opponent’s game; in his building of St. Petersburg, where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the first year.  But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his dealings with the serf system.  Serfage was already recognized in Peter’s time as an evil.  Peter himself once stormed forth in protestations and invectives against what he stigmatized as “selling men like beasts; separating parents from children, husbands from wives; which takes place nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow.”  He declared that a law should be made against it.  Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.

For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron.  He never stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia as a forced growth.  In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs.  These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.

And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more.  Cold-blooded officials were set at taking the census.  These adopted easy classifications; free peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under a single denomination.  So serfage became still more difficult to be distinguished from slavery.  As this base of hideous wrong was thus widened and deepened the nobles built higher and stronger their superstructure of arrogance and pretension.  Not many years after Peter’s death, they so overawed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes of the empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from the soil.  So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.