ign influences which Peter was introducing into
the country.

There was no one in the imperial family to whom this party could look
for a leader and head except the Princess Sophia. The Czar John,
Peter's feeble brother, was dead, otherwise they might have made his
name their rallying cry. Sophia was still shut up in the convent to
which Peter had sent her on the discovery of her conspiracy against
him. She was kept very closely guarded there. Still, the leaders of
the opposition contrived to open a communication with her. They took
every means to increase and extend the prevailing discontent. To
people of wealth and rank they represented the heavy taxes which they
were obliged to pay to defray the expenses of the emperor's wild
schemes, and the loss of their own proper influence and power in the
government of the country, they themselves being displaced to make room
for foreigners, or favorites like Menzikoff, that were raised from the
lowest grades of life to posts of honor and profit which ought to be
bestowed upon the ancient nobility alone. To the poor and ignorant
they advanced other arguments, which were addressed chiefly to their
religious prejudices. The government were subverting all the ancient
usages of the country, they said, and throwing every thing into the
hands of infidel or heretical foreigners. The course which the Czar
was pursuing was contrary to the laws of God, they said, who had
forbidden the children of Israel to have any communion with the
unbelieving nations around them, in order that they might not be led
away by them into idolatry. And so in Russia, they said, the extensive
power of granting permission to any Russian subject to leave the
country vested, according to the ancient usages of the empire, with the
patriarch, the head of the Church--and Peter had violated these usages
in sending away so many of the sons of the nobility without the
patriarch's consent. There were many other measures, too, which Peter
had adopted, or which he had then in contemplation, that were equally
obnoxious to the charge of impiety. For instance, he had formed a
plan--and he had even employed engineers to take preliminary steps in
reference to the execution of it--for making a canal from the River
Wolga to the River Don, thus presumptuously and impiously undertaking
to turn the streams one way, when Providence had designed them to flow
in another! Absurd as many of these representations were, they