Borys, could have enslaved a people.  His legislation is involved in as much doubt as for a long time were the Sempronian Laws of Rome.  If we could believe that he instituted the system of serfage, or seriously strengthened it, we should find that Russian slavery came into existence but a few years before American slavery; but such a “coincidence” cannot be rigidly insisted upon.  It would, however, we think, be difficult to show that the condition of the Russian laboring classes was not made worse by the action of the usurper.

Peter the Great was so affected by the circumstance that men and women and children could be sold like cattle, as American slaves now are, that he sought to put a stop to the infamous traffic, but without success.  Catharine II. was a philosopher, and a patron of that eighteenth-century philosophy which so largely favored human rights, and she regretted the existence of serfage; but, in spite of this regret, and of some sentimental efforts toward emancipation, she strengthened the system of slavery under which so great a majority of her subjects lived.  She gave peasants to her “favorites,” and to others whom she wished to reward or to bribe.  The brothers Orloff are said to have received forty-five thousand peasants from her, being in part payment for what was done by their family in setting up the new Russian dynasty founded by the German princess.  Potemkin received myriads of peasants.  Some outrageous abuses were practised by wealthy landholders, in consequence of the Czarina having proclaimed that the laborers in Little Russia should belong to the soil on which they were at that date employed.  Thousands of persons were entrapped into serfdom through a measure which the sovereign had intended should lessen the evils of that institution.  Catharine’s authority was never but once seriously disputed at home, and that was by the rebellion of Pugatscheff, which is sometimes spoken of as an outbreak against serfdom, which it was not in any proper sense, though the abuses of the owners of serfs may have contributed to swell the ranks of the pretender,—­Pugatscheff calling himself Peter III.  The Czar Paul would not allow serfs to be sold apart from the soil to which they belonged.  It is a curious incident, that, when Paul restored Kosciusko to liberty, he offered to give him a number of Russian peasants.  The Polish patriot had no hesitation in refusing to accept the Emperor’s offer, for which, in these times, there are Americans who think he was a fool; but in 1797 certain lights had not been vouchsafed to the American mind, that have since led some of our countrymen to become champions of the cause of darkness.