he capital, Peter cut off the natural
ligaments which bound up the encroaching system of the old Muscovite
Czars with the natural abilities and aspirations of the great Russian
race. By planting his capital on the margin of a sea, he put to open
defiance the anti-maritime instincts of that race, and degraded it to a
mere weight in his political mechanism. Since the 16th century Muscovy
had made no important acquisitions but on the side of Siberia, and to
the 16th century the dubious conquests made towards the west and the
south were only brought about by direct agency on the east. By the
transfer of the capital, Peter proclaimed that he, on the contrary,
intended working on the east and the immediately neighbouring countries
through the agency of the west. If the agency through the east was
narrowly circumscribed by the stationary character and the limited
relations of Asiatic peoples, the agency through the west became at once
illimited and universal from the movable character and the all-sided
relations of Western Europe. The transfer of the capital denoted this
intended change of agency, which the conquest of the Baltic provinces
afforded the means of achieving, by securing at once to Russia the
supremacy among the neighbouring Northern States; by putting it into
immediate and constant contact with all points of Europe; by laying the
basis of a material bond with the maritime Powers, which by this
conquest became dependent on Russia for their naval stores; a dependence
not existing as long as Muscovy, the country that produced the great
bulk of the naval stores, had got no outlets of its own; while Sweden,
the Power that held these outlets, had not got the country lying behind
them.

If the Muscovite Czars, who worked their encroachments by the agency
principally of the Tartar Khans, were obliged to _tartarize_ Muscovy,
Peter the Great, who resolved upon working through the agency of the
west, was obliged to _civilize_ Russia. In grasping upon the Baltic
provinces, he seized at once the tools necessary for this process. They
afforded him not only the diplomatists and the generals, the brains with
which to execute his system of political and military action on the
west, they yielded him, at the same time, a crop of bureaucrats,
schoolmasters, and drill-sergeants, who were to drill Russians into that
varnish of civilization that adapts them to the technical appliances of
the Western peoples, without imbuing them with t