whatsoever and to whatever family he belonged, should salute and yield place to any officer.  The gentleman served as a private soldier and became an officer, but a private soldier who did not belong to the nobility, and who attained the rank of a commissioned officer, became, ipso facto, a member of the hereditary nobility....  In the civil service he introduced the same democratic system.  He divided it into three sections:  military, civil, and court.  Every section was divided into fourteen ranks, or Chins; the attainment of the eighth class conferred the privilege of hereditary nobility, even though those who received it might have been of the humblest origin.  He hereby replaced the aristocratic hierarchy of pedigree by a democratic hierachy of service.  Promotion was made solely according to service; lineage counted for nothing.  There was no social difference, however wide, which could not be levelled by means of State service.”  This is partly what was meant when it was stated in the last paragraph that Russia was socially the most democratic of modern countries.  The system established by Peter the Great exists to-day.  Russia is governed, not by a feudal nobility like that which ground the faces of the poor in France before the revolution of 1789, nor by a number of capitalists who live by exploiting the workers; for neither feudal nobility nor capitalism (as yet) has any real power in Russia.  She is governed by a civil service, and by a civil service more democratic than our own, where the higher posts are as a rule only open to members of the upper and middle classes, less exclusive than that of India, where the higher officials are nearly all recruited from the members of an alien race—­a civil service, in short, whose only close parallel is the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.  Imagine the Roman Church as a secular institution, with a monarch at its head ruling by hereditary right instead of an elected president like the Pope, and you get a very fair idea of the Russian Government machine.  All that we associate with the word aristocracy in the West, the hereditary principle, primo-geniture, the accumulation of the land and capital of the country in the hands of a small class, the spirit of caste, the traditions of nobility handed down with the title-deeds from father to son, are either non-existent or of comparative unimportance in Russian society.

There is also none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature of the life in “democratic” England and to which we have given the name “snobbery.”  There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are broadly marked and there is no sense of competition between them.  A peasant is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a nobleman he meets him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior position in the social scale.  A twin-brother of English “snobbery” is