had been shorn of authority—­was now abolished, and a Holy Synod of his own appointing took its place.  For the Sobor or States-General there was substituted a Senate, also of his own appointing.  The Streltsui, or militia, was swept out of existence; the military Cossacks were deprived of their Hetman or leader; and a standing army, raised by recruiting, replaced these organizations.  Nobility meant service.  Every nobleman while he lived must serve the state, and he held his fief only upon condition of such service; while a nobleman who could not read or write in a foreign tongue forfeited his birthright.  This was the way Peter fought idleness and ignorance in his land!  New and freer municipal organizations were given to the cities, enlarging the privileges of the citizens; schools and colleges were established; the awful punishment for debtors swept away.  He was leveling up as well as leveling down—­trying to create a great plateau of modern society, in which he alone towered high, rigid, and inexorable.

If the attempt was impossible and against nature, if Peter violated every law of social development by such a monstrous creation of a modern state, what could have been done better?  How long would it have taken Russia to grow into modern civilization?  And what would it be now if there had not been just such a strange being—­with the nature and heart of a barbarian joined with a brain and an intelligence the peer of any in Europe, capable of seeing that the only hope for Russia was by force to convert it from an Asiatic into a European state?

One act bore with extreme severity upon the free peasantry.  They were compelled to enroll themselves with the serfs in their Communes, or to be dealt with as vagrants.  Peter has been censured for this and also for not extending his reforming broom to the Communes and overthrowing the whole patriarchal system under which they existed—­a system so out of harmony with the modern state he was creating.  But it seems to the writer rather that he was guided by a sure instinct when he left untouched the one thing in a Slavonic state, which was really Slavonic.  He and the long line of rulers behind him had been ruling by virtue of an authority established by aliens.  Russia had from the time of Rurik been governed and formed after foreign models.  Peter was at least choosing better models than his predecessors.  If it was an apparent mistake to build a modern, centralized state in the eighteenth century upon a social organization belonging to the eleventh century, it may be that in so doing, an inspired despot builded wiser than he knew.  May it not be that the final regeneration of that land is to come some day, from the leaven of native instincts in her peasantry, which have never been invaded by foreign influences and which have survived all the vicissitudes of a thousand years in Russia?