s, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants,
just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges. To this the peasants
submitted; but history has not been able to drown their sighs over this
wrong; their proverbs and ballads make St. George's Day representative
of all ill-luck and disappointment.

A few years later Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued
a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain
free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This
completed the work, and Russia, which never had had the benefits of
feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse, a serf
caste, bound to the glebe.

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 that transformed it from a
petty Asiatic horde to a great European Power.

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, 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 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.

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