between Church and State.  All the factors have worked in unison, and the development has been guided by the spirit of pure orthodoxy.  But in this harmonious picture there is one big, ugly black spot—­Peter, falsely styled “the Great,” and his so-called reforms.  Instead of following the wise policy of his ancestors, Peter rejected the national traditions and principles, and applied to his country, which belonged to the Eastern world, the principles of Western civilisation.  His reforms, conceived in a foreign spirit, and elaborated by men who did not possess the national instincts, were forced upon the nation against its will, and the result was precisely what might have been expected.  The “broad Slavonic nature” could not be controlled by institutions which had been invented by narrow-minded, pedantic German bureaucrats, and, like another Samson, it pulled down the building in which foreign legislators sought to confine it.  The attempt to introduce foreign culture had a still worse effect.  The upper classes, charmed and dazzled by the glare and glitter of Western science, threw themselves impulsively on the newly found treasures, and thereby condemned themselves to moral slavery and intellectual sterility.  Fortunately—­and herein lay one of the fundamental principles of the Slavophil doctrine—­the imported civilisation had not at all infected the common people.  Through all the changes which the administration and the Noblesse underwent the peasantry preserved religiously in their hearts “the living legacy of antiquity,” the essence of Russian nationality, “a clear spring welling up living waters, hidden and unknown, but powerful."* To recover this lost legacy by studying the character, customs, and institutions of the peasantry, to lead the educated classes back to the path from which they had strayed, and to re-establish that intellectual and moral unity which had been disturbed by the foreign importations—­such was the task which the Slavophils proposed to themselves.

     * This was one of the favourite themes of Khomiakof, the
     Slavophil poet and theologian.

Deeply imbued with that romantic spirit which distorted all the intellectual activity of the time, the Slavophils often indulged in the wildest exaggerations, condemning everything foreign and praising everything Russian.  When in this mood they saw in the history of the West nothing but violence, slavery, and egotism, and in that of their own country free-will, liberty, and peace.  The fact that Russia did not possess free political institutions was adduced as a precious fruit of that spirit of Christian resignation and self-sacrifice which places the Russian at such an immeasurable height above the proud, selfish European; and because Russia possessed few of the comforts and conveniences of common life, the West was accused of having made comfort its God!  We need not, however, dwell on these puerilities, which only gained for their authors the reputation of being ignorant, narrow-minded men, imbued