of the
_boyars_, who were analogous to the mediaeval barons, and of Peter the
Great's substitution of a nobility of service for that of rank, Russia
is politically more centralised than any mediaeval, and socially more
democratic than any modern, country. Russia has also solved that other
great problem which perpetually agitated the mediaeval world--the conflict
between the secular and the spiritual power. She is the most religious
nation in the world, but she has no Papacy; Peter the Great subordinated
the Church to the State by placing the Holy Synod, which controls the
former, under the authority of a layman, a minister appointed by the Tsar.
Yet, while she appears united and centralised when we think of her nebulous
prototype, the Holy Roman Empire, we have only to compare her with her
Western neighbours, and especially with that triumph of State-organisation,
Germany, to see how amorphous, how inefficient, how loose, how mediaeval is
the structure of this enormous State.

Peter the Great, who was more than any other man the creator of modern
Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-mass
together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he
saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a
disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandisement
of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic
principles. As Mr. Maurice Baring puts it, "Peter the Great introduced
the democratic idea that service was everything, rank nothing. He had it
proclaimed to the whole gentry that any gentleman, in any circumstances
whatsoever and to whatever family he belonged, should salute and yield
place to any officer. The gentleman served as a private soldier and became
an officer, but a private soldier who did not belong to the nobility, and
who attained the rank of a commissioned officer, became, _ipso facto_, a
member of the hereditary nobility.... In the civil service he introduced
the same democratic system. He divided it into three sections: military,
civil, and court. Every section was divided into fourteen ranks, or
_Chins_; the attainment of the eighth class conferred the privilege of
hereditary nobility, even though those who received it might have been
of the humblest origin. He hereby replaced the aristocratic hierarchy of
pedigree by a democratic hierachy of service. Promotion was made solely
according to service; lineage co