The great waves of wrong which bore serfage into Russia seem to have moved with a kind of tidal regularity, and the distance between their crests in those earlier times appears to have been just a hundred years,—­for, again, at the end of the next century, surge over the nation the ideas of Peter the Great.

The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart.  The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,—­how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,—­how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a great European power.

And the praise due to this work can never be diminished.  Time shall but increase it; for the world has yet to learn most of the wonderful details of his activity.  We were present a few years since, when one of those lesser triumphs of his genius was first unfolded.

It was in that room at the Hermitage—­adjoining the Winter Palace—­set apart for the relics of Peter.  Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American industry,—­one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of inventors’ rights.

Suddenly from the inventor,[C] pulling over some old dust-covered machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise.  The cries were natural indeed.  In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself:  specimens of his unfinished work were still in them.  They had lain there unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune.  At the late Paris Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten machine of Peter’s.

[Footnote C:  The late Samuel Colt.]

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 reviews and 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.