unted for nothing. There was no social
difference, however wide, which could not be levelled by means of State
service." This is partly what was meant when it was stated in the last
paragraph that Russia was socially the most democratic of modern countries.
The system established by Peter the Great exists to-day. Russia is
governed, not by a feudal nobility like that which ground the faces of
the poor in France before the revolution of 1789, nor by a number of
capitalists who live by exploiting the workers; for neither feudal nobility
nor capitalism (as yet) has any real power in Russia. She is governed by a
civil service, and by a civil service more democratic than our own, where
the higher posts are as a rule only open to members of the upper and middle
classes, less exclusive than that of India, where the higher officials are
nearly all recruited from the members of an alien race--a civil service,
in short, whose only close parallel is the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic
Church. Imagine the Roman Church as a secular institution, with a monarch
at its head ruling by hereditary right instead of an elected president like
the Pope, and you get a very fair idea of the Russian Government machine.
All that we associate with the word aristocracy in the West, the hereditary
principle, primo-geniture, the accumulation of the land and capital of the
country in the hands of a small class, the spirit of caste, the traditions
of nobility handed down with the title-deeds from father to son, are either
non-existent or of comparative unimportance in Russian society.

There is also none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions
and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature
of the life in "democratic" England and to which we have given the name
"snobbery." There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are
broadly marked and there is no sense of competition between them. A peasant
is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a nobleman he meets
him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior
position in the social scale. A twin-brother of English "snobbery" is
English "hypocrisy." This, as has been well said, is a kind of "social
cement," for it is a tribute to a standard of social conduct set up by the
dominant class in a nation. And since there exists no dominant class in
Russia, but only a dominant hierarchy drawn from all classes, hypocrisy is
absent from