was a philanthropist, but because she loved civilization.  It was her intellect, not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer.  When she severely punished and forever disgraced a lady of high rank for cruelty to her serfs,—­forty of whom had been tortured to death,—­it was because she had the educated instincts of a European, not an Asiatic, and she had also the intelligence to realize that no state could be made sound which rested upon a foundation of human misery.  She established a Russian Academy modeled after the French, its object being to fix the rules for writing and speaking the Russian language and to promote the study of Russian history.  In other words, Catherine was a reformer fully in sympathy with the best methods prevailing in Western Europe.  She was profoundly interested in the New Philosophy and the intellectual movement in France, was in correspondence with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories of Rousseau.

Of course the influence exerted by French genius over Russian civilization at this time did not penetrate far below the upper and highly educated class; but there is no doubt it left a deep impress upon the literature and art of the nation, and also modified Russian characteristics by introducing religious tolerance and habits of courtesy, besides making aspirations after social justice and political liberty entirely respectable.  Catherine’s “Book of Instructions” to the commission which was created by her to assist in making a new code of laws contained political maxims which would satisfy advanced reformers to-day; although when she saw later that the French Revolution was their logical conclusion, she repudiated them, took Voltaire’s bust down from its pedestal, and had it thrown into a rubbish heap.  The work she was accomplishing for Russia was second only to that of Peter the Great; and when she is reproached for not having done more and for not having broken the chains forged by Boris upon twenty million people, let it be remembered that she lived in the eighteenth, and not the nineteenth, century; and that at that very time Franklin and Jefferson were framing a constitution which sanctioned the existence of negro slavery in an ideal republic!

A new generation had grown up in Poland, men not nobles nor serfs, but a race of patriots familiar with the stirring literature of their century.  They had seen their land broken into fragments and then ground fine by a proud and infatuated nobility.  They had seen their pusillanimous kings one after another yielding to the insolent demands for their territory.  Polish territory extended eastward into the Ukraine; now that must be cut off and dropped into the lap of Russia.  Another arm extended north, separating Eastern Prussia from Western.  That too must be cut off and fall to Prussia.  Then after shearing these extremities, the Poland which was left must not only accept the spoliation, but co-operate with her despoilers in adopting under their direction a constitution