make private citizens do the same; but the uproar and discontent were so
great that he was obliged to compromise the matter, and allow the
citizens to wear their beards and robes on condition of a heavy tax,
graded on ability to pay it. The only class he exempted from the tax
were the clergy and the serfs.

Among other reforms he changed the calendar, making the year to begin
with January, and abolished the old laws with reference to marriage, by
which young people had no power of choice; but he decreed that no
marriage should take place unless an intimacy had existed between the
parties for at least six months. He instituted balls and assemblies, to
soften the manners of the people. He encouraged the theatre, protected
science, invited eminent men to settle in Russia, improved the courts of
justice, established posts and post-offices, boards of trade, a vigorous
police, hospitals, and alms-houses. He imported Saxony sheep, erected
linen, woollen, and paper mills, dug canals, suppressed gambling, and
fostered industry and art. He aimed to do for Russia what Richelieu and
Colbert did for France.

The greatest opposition to his reforms came from the clergy, with the
Patriarch at their head,--a personage of great dignity and power, ruling
an _imperium in imperio_. Peter had no hostility to the Greek religion,
nor to the clergy. Like Charlemagne, he was himself descended from an
ecclesiastical family. But finding the clergy hostile to civil and
social reforms, he sought to change the organization of the Church
itself. He did not interfere with doctrines, nor discipline, nor rites,
nor forms of worship; but he unseated the Patriarch, and appointed
instead a consistory, the members of which were nominated by himself.
Like Henry VIII., he virtually made himself the head of the
Church,--that is, the supreme direction of ecclesiastical affairs was
given to those whom he controlled, and not to the Patriarch, whose power
had been supreme in religious matters,--more than Papal, almost
Druidical. In former reigns the Patriarch had the power of life and
death in his own tribunals; and when he rode to church on Palm Sunday,
in his emblazoned robes, the Czar walked uncovered at his side, and held
the bridle of his mule. It is a mark of the extraordinary power of Peter
that he was enabled to abolish this great dignity without a revolution
or bloodshed; and he not only abolished the patriarchal dignity, but he
seized the revenues of th