sary, after a long search tracked him to his hiding place
and induced him to return. There was a terrible scene with his father,
who had discovered that his son was more than perverse, he was a
traitor--the center of a conspiracy, and in close relations with his
enemies at home and abroad, betraying his interests to Germany and to
Sweden.

The plan, instigated by Eudoxia, was that Alexis, immediately upon the
death of his father--which God was importuned to hasten--should return
to Moscow, restore the picturesque old barbarism, abandon the territory
on the Baltic, and the infant navy, and the city of his father's love;
in other words, that he should scatter to the winds the prodigious
results of his father's reign! It was monstrous--and so was its
punishment! Eudoxia was whipped and placed in close confinement, and
thirty conspirators, members of her "court," were in various ways
butchered. Then Alexis, the confessed traitor, was tried by a tribunal
at the head of which was Menschikof--and sentenced to death.

On the morning of the 27th of June, 1718, the Tsar summoned his son to
appear before nine of the greatest officers of the state. Concerning
what happened, the lips of those nine men were forever sealed. But the
day following it was announced that Alexis, the son of the emperor, was
dead; and it is believed that he died under the knout.

The question of succession now became a very grave one. Alexis, who
had under compulsion married Charlotte of Brunswick, left a son Peter.
The only other heirs were the Tsar's two daughters Anna and Elizabeth,
the children of Catherine. Shortly after the tragedy of his son's
death, Peter caused Catherine to be formally crowned Empress, probably
in anticipation of his own death, which occurred in 1725.

CHAPTER XVII

GERMINATING OF SEED--CATHERINE EMPRESS

The chief objection to a wise and beneficent despotism is that its
creator is not immortal. The trouble with the Alexanders and the
Charlemagnes and the Peters is that the span of human life is too short
for their magnificent designs, which fall, while incomplete, into
incompetent or vicious hands, and the work is overthrown. Peter's rest
in his mausoleum at Sts. Peter and Paul must have been uneasy if he saw
the reigns immediately succeeding his own. Not one man capable of a
lofty patriotism like his, not one man working with unselfish energy
for Russia; but, just as in the olden time, oligarchic factions w