by the Russians, up to 1703, when Peter the Great
made himself master of it. He determined to found upon this desolate spot
the future capital of his vast empire, and at once commenced the task,
without waiting for peace to confirm the possession of the site. He
assembled a vast number of the peasantry from every quarter of his empire,
and pushed forward the work with the energy of an iron will armed with
absolute power. The surrounding country, ravaged by long years of war,
could furnish no supplies for these enormous masses, and the convoys which
brought them across Lake Ladoga were frequently detained by contrary
winds. Ill fed and worse lodged, laboring in the cold and wet, multitudes
yielded to the hardships, and the foundations of the new metropolis were
laid at the cost of a hundred thousand lives, sacrificed in less than six
months.

With Peter to will was to perform; he willed that a capital city should be
built and inhabited, and built and inhabited it was. In April, 1714, a
ukase was issued directing that all buildings should be erected in a
particular manner; another, three months later, ordered a large number of
nobles and merchants to erect dwellings in the new city. In a few months
more another ukase prohibited the erection of any stone mansion in any
other portion of the empire, while the enterprise of the capital was in
progress; and that the lack of building materials should be no obstacle,
every vessel, whether large or small, and every peasant's car which came
to the city, was ordered to bring a certain specified number of building
stones. The work undertaken with such rigid determination, and carried on
with such remorseless vigor by Peter, was continued in the same
unflinching spirit by his successors; and the result was the present St.
Petersburg, with its aspect more imposing than that of any other city on
the globe, but bearing in its bosom the elements of its own destruction,
the moment it is freed from the control of the iron will, which created
and now maintains it:--a fitting type and representative of the Russian
Empire.

The whole enterprise of founding and maintaining St. Petersburg was and is
a struggle against nature. The soil is a marsh so deep and spongy that a
solid foundation can be attained only by constructing a subterranean
scaffolding of piles. Were it not for these the city would sink into the
marsh like a stage ghost through the trap-door. Every building of any
magnitude rest