Historically speaking, the Russian Empire is an extension of the old Roman Empire; it is the direct heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, as the mediaeval “Holy Roman Empire,” founded by Charlemagne in A.D. 800, was the heir of the Western Roman Empire, which had its capital at Rome itself.  But the Eastern Empire survived its Western twin by a thousand years; the Goths deposed the last Roman emperor in 476, the Turks took Constantinople in 1453.  The Russian Empire, therefore, which did not begin its political development until after the fall of Constantinople, entered the field some six and a half centuries later than the mediaeval empire of Charlemagne, which was indeed already falling to pieces in the end of the fifteenth century.  Thus Russia presents the strange spectacle of a mediaeval State existing in the twentieth century, and she is still in some particulars what Western Europe was in the Middle Ages.  She has, however, attained a unity, a strength and a centralisation which the Holy Roman Empire never succeeded in acquiring.  There is nothing corresponding to the feudal system, with all the disruptive tendencies which that system carried with it, in modern Russia; partly owing to the constant danger of Mongolian invasion which threatened Russia for so many centuries, partly as a result of Ivan the Terrible’s destruction of the boyars, who were analogous to the mediaeval barons, and of Peter the Great’s substitution of a nobility of service for that of rank, Russia is politically more centralised than any mediaeval, and socially more democratic than any modern, country.  Russia has also solved that other great problem which perpetually agitated the mediaeval world—­the conflict between the secular and the spiritual power.  She is the most religious nation in the world, but she has no Papacy; Peter the Great subordinated the Church to the State by placing the Holy Synod, which controls the former, under the authority of a layman, a minister appointed by the Tsar.  Yet, while she appears united and centralised when we think of her nebulous prototype, the Holy Roman Empire, we have only to compare her with her Western neighbours, and especially with that triumph of State-organisation, Germany, to see how amorphous, how inefficient, how loose, how mediaeval is the structure of this enormous State.

Peter the Great, who was more than any other man the creator of modern Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-mass together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandisement of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic principles.  As Mr. Maurice Baring puts it, “Peter the Great introduced the democratic idea that service was everything, rank nothing.  He had it proclaimed to the whole gentry that any gentleman, in any circumstances