were deprived of their _Hetman_ or leader; and a
standing army, raised by recruiting, replaced these organizations.
Nobility meant service. Every nobleman while he lived must serve the
state, and he held his fief only upon condition of such service; while
a nobleman who could not read or write in a foreign tongue forfeited
his birthright. This was the way Peter fought idleness and ignorance
in his land! New and freer municipal organizations were given to the
cities, enlarging the privileges of the citizens; schools and colleges
were established; the awful punishment for debtors swept away. He was
leveling up as well as leveling down--trying to create a great plateau
of modern society, in which he alone towered high, rigid, and
inexorable.

If the attempt was impossible and against nature, if Peter violated
every law of social development by such a monstrous creation of a
modern state, what could have been done better? How long would it have
taken Russia to _grow_ into modern civilization? And what would it be
now if there had not been just such a strange being--with the nature
and heart of a barbarian joined with a brain and an intelligence the
peer of any in Europe, capable of seeing that the only hope for Russia
was by force to convert it from an Asiatic into a European state?

One act bore with extreme severity upon the free peasantry. They were
compelled to enroll themselves with the serfs in their Communes, or to
be dealt with as vagrants. Peter has been censured for this and also
for not extending his reforming broom to the Communes and overthrowing
the whole patriarchal system under which they existed--a system so out
of harmony with the modern state he was creating. But it seems to the
writer rather that he was guided by a sure instinct when he left
untouched the one thing in a Slavonic state, which was really Slavonic.
He and the long line of rulers behind him had been ruling by virtue of
an authority established by aliens. Russia had from the time of Rurik
been governed and formed after foreign models. Peter was at least
choosing better models than his predecessors. If it was an apparent
mistake to build a modern, centralized state in the eighteenth century
upon a social organization belonging to the eleventh century, it may be
that in so doing, an inspired despot builded wiser than he knew. May
it not be that the final regeneration of that land is to come some day,
from the leaven of native inst