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 before had; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.[D]

[Footnote D:  Haxthausen, Etudes sur la Situation Interieure, etc., de la Russie.]

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.[E]

[Footnote E:  Gurowski,—­also Wolowski in Revue des Deux Mondes.]

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 over-awed 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.

But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler from whom the world came to expect much.

To mount the throne, Catharine II. had murdered her husband; to keep the throne, she had murdered two claimants whose title was better than her own.  She then became, with her agents in these horrors, a second Messalina.

To set herself right in the eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of skepticism which in that age made or marred European reputations.  She flattered the fierce Deists by owning fealty to “Le Roi Voltaire;” she flattered the mild Deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she flattered the Atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself.

Her murders and orgies were soon forgotten in the new hopes for Russian regeneration.  Her dealings with Russia strengthened these hopes.  The official style required that all persons presenting petitions should subscribe themselves “Your Majesty’s humble serf.”  This formula she abolished, and boasted that she had cast out the word serf from the Russian language.  Poets and philosophers echoed this boast over Europe, —­and the serfs waited.