A few years later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He
issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from
certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his
edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the
benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst
curse,--a serf-caste bound to the glebe.

The great waves of wrong which bore serfage into Russia seem to have
moved with a kind of tidal regularity, and the distance between their
crests in those earlier times appears to have been just a hundred
years,--for, again, at the end of the next century, surge over the
nation the ideas of Peter the Great.

The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world
knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,--how,
despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,--how he
dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a
petty Asiatic horde to a great European power.

And the praise due to this work can never be diminished. Time shall
but increase it; for the world has yet to learn most of the wonderful
details of his activity. We were present a few years since, when one of
those lesser triumphs of his genius was first unfolded.

It was in that room at the Hermitage--adjoining the Winter Palace--set
apart for the relics of Peter. Our companions were two men noted as
leaders in American industry,--one famed as an inventor, the other famed
as a champion of inventors' rights.

Suddenly from the inventor,[C] pulling over some old dust-covered
machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were
natural indeed. In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning
irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself:
specimens of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there
unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter
and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in
America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris
Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying
statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old,
forgotten machine of Peter's.

[Footnote C: The late Samuel Colt.]

Yet, though Peter fought so well, and thought so well, he made some
mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For
in all his