g in resources from his
time to ours. To-day Russia stands out as a first-class power, with the
largest army in the world; a menace to Germany, a rival of Great Britain
in the extension of conquests to the East, threatening to seize Turkey
and control the Black Sea, and even to take possession of Oriental
empires which extend to the Pacific Ocean.

Nobody doubts or questions that the rise of Russia to its present proud
and threatening position is chiefly owing to the genius and policy of
Peter the Great. Peter was a descendant of a patriarch of the Greek
Church in Russia, whose name was Romanoff, and who was his
great-grandfather. His grandfather married a near relative of the Czar,
and succeeded him by election. His father, Alexis, was an able man, and
made war on the Turks.

Peter was a child when his father died, and his half-brother Theodore
became the Czar. But Theodore reigned only a short time, and Peter
succeeded him at the age of ten (1682), the government remaining in the
hands of his half-sister, Sophia, a woman of great ability and
intelligence, but intriguing and unscrupulous. She was aided by Prince
Galitzin, the ablest statesman of Russia, who held the great office of
chancellor. This prince, it would seem, with the aid of the general of
the Streltzi (the ancient imperial guards) and the cabals of Sophia,
conspired against the life of Peter, then seventeen years of age,
inasmuch as he began to manifest extraordinary abilities and a will of
his own. But the young Hercules strangled the serpent,--sent Galitzin to
Siberia, confined his sister Sophia in a convent for the rest of her
days, and assumed the reins of government himself, although a mere
youth, in conjunction with his brother John. That which characterized
him was a remarkable precocity, greater than that of anybody of whom I
have read. At eighteen he was a man, with a fine physical development
and great beauty of form, and entered upon absolute and undisputed power
as Czar of Muscovy.

In the years of the regency, when the government was in the hands of his
half-sister, he did not give promise of those remarkable abilities and
that life of self-control which afterwards marked his career.

In his earlier youth he had been surrounded with seductive pleasures, as
Louis XIV. had been, by the queen-regent, with a view to _control_ him,
not oppose him; and he yielded to these pleasures, and is said to have
been a very dissipated young man, with his