plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme
lack,--lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.

Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster
Hall,--"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia,
and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;"--or when, at
Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his
servants to be hanged in order to test it;--or, in his reviews and
parade-fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the
buttons off their bayonets.

Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an
army to learn his opponent's game,--in his building of St. Petersburg,
where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the
first year.

But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his dealings with
the serf-system.

Serfage was already recognized in Peter's time as an evil. Peter himself
once stormed forth in protestations and invectives against what he
stigmatized as "selling men like beasts,--separating parents from
children, husbands from wives,--which takes place nowhere else in the
world, and which causes many tears to flow." He declared that a law
should be made against it. Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage
was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.

For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that
Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging
iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron. He never
stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands, as a
natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia, as a forced growth.

In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid
workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs.
These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the
State they before had; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse
than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.[D]

[Footnote D: Haxthausen, _Etudes sur la Situation Interieure_, etc., _de
la Russie._]

And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more. Cold-blooded officials were
set at taking the census. These adopted easy classifications; free
peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under
a single denomination. So serfage became still more difficult to be
distinguished from slavery.[E]

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