gradually
learning something of the fashions, the literature, the institutions,
and the moral conceptions of Western Europe, and the nobles naturally
compared the class to which they belonged with the aristocracies of
Germany and France. For those who were influenced by the new foreign
ideas the comparison was humiliating. In the West the Noblesse was a
free and privileged class, proud of its liberty, its rights, and its
culture; whereas in Russia the nobles were servants of the State,
without privileges, without dignity, subject to corporal punishment, and
burdened with onerous duties from which there was no escape. Thus arose
in that section of the Noblesse which had some acquaintance with Western
civilisation a feeling of discontent, and a desire to gain a social
position similar to that of the nobles in France and Germany. These
aspirations were in part realised by Peter III., who in 1762 abolished
the principle of obligatory service. His consort, Catherine II., went
much farther in the same direction, and inaugurated a new epoch in the
history of the Dvoryanstvo, a period in which its duties and obligations
fell into the background, and its rights and privileges came to the
front.

Catherine had good reason to favour the Noblesse. As a foreigner and
a usurper, raised to the throne by a Court conspiracy, she could not
awaken in the masses that semi-religious veneration which the legitimate
Tsars have always enjoyed, and consequently she had to seek support
in the upper classes, who were less rigid and uncompromising in their
conceptions of legitimacy. She confirmed, therefore, the ukaz which
abolished obligatory service of the nobles, and sought to gain their
voluntary service by honours and rewards. In her manifestoes she always
spoke of them in the most flattering terms; and tried to convince them
that the welfare of the country depended on their loyalty and devotion.
Though she had no intention of ceding any of her political power, she
formed the nobles of each province into a corporation, with periodical
assemblies, which were supposed to resemble the French Provincial
Parliaments, and entrusted to each of these corporations a large part
of the local administration. By these and similar means, aided by her
masculine energy and feminine tact, she made herself very popular,
and completely changed the old conceptions about the public service.
Formerly service had been looked on as a burden; now it came to be
looke