so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia,
and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin,
having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be
hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he
ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.

Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an
army to learn his opponent's game; in his building of St. Petersburg,
where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the
first year. But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his
dealings with the serf system. 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 had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse
than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.

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. 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 overawed 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