tars; that the Baltic provinces, from their very
geographical configuration, are naturally a corollary to whichever
nation holds the country behind them; that, in one word, Peter, in this
quarter, at least, but took hold of what was absolutely necessary for
the natural development of his country. From this point of view, Peter
the Great intended, by his war against Sweden, only rearing a Russian
Liverpool, and endowing it with its indispensable strip of coast.

But then, one great fact is slighted over, the _tour de force_ by which
he transferred the capital of the Empire from the inland centre to the
maritime extremity, the characteristic boldness with which he erected
the new capital on the first strip of Baltic coast he conquered, almost
within gunshot of the frontier, thus deliberately giving his dominions
an _eccentric centre_. To transfer the throne of the Czars from Moscow
to Petersburg was to place it in a position where it could not be safe,
even from insult, until the whole coast from Libau to Tornea was
subdued--a work not completed till 1809, by the conquest of Finland.
"St. Petersburg is the window from which Russia can overlook Europe,"
said Algarotti. It was from the first a defiance to the Europeans, an
incentive to further conquest to the Russians. The fortifications in our
own days of Russian Poland are only a further step in the execution of
the same idea. Modlin, Warsaw, Ivangorod, are more than citadels to keep
a rebellious country in check. They are the same menace to the west
which Petersburg, in its immediate bearing, was a hundred years ago to
the north. They are to transform Russia into Panslavonia, as the Baltic
provinces were to transform Muscovy into Russia.

Petersburg, the _eccentric centre_ of the empire, pointed at once to a
periphery still to be drawn.

It is, then, not the mere conquest of the Baltic provinces which
separates the policy of Peter the Great from that of his ancestors, but
it is the transfer of the capital which reveals the true meaning of his
Baltic conquests. Petersburg was not like Muscovy, the centre of a race,
but the seat of a government; not the slow work of a people, but the
instantaneous creation of a man; not the medium from which the
peculiarities of an inland people radiate, but the maritime extremity
where they are lost; not the traditionary nucleus of a national
development, but the deliberately chosen abode of a cosmopolitan
intrigue. By the transfer of t