despise the
language of her country. She put her court to school, and at the
"Hermitage" so many lines of Russian were learned every day. But
Radistchev said: "Fear and silence reign round Czarkoe-Sielo. The
silence of Death is there, for there despotism has its abode." He
received the knout and Siberia, because his words were true. She lived,
as he said, remote from her people. Beggars were forbidden to enter
Moscow, lest she should see them; but a rumor ran after her return from
the South that Alexis Orloff led her into a barn where were laid out the
bodies of all who had died of hunger on the day of her triumphal entry.
Like Peter the Great, she even in some ways intensified serfdom. A
hundred fifty thousand "peasants of the crown" were handed over by her
as serfs to her lovers. Their proprietors could send them with hard
labor to Siberia; they could give them fifteen thousand blows for a
trifling offence; a Soltikoff tortured seventy-five to death. _Sed
ignoti perierunt mortibus illi!_ the day will come, but not yet.

This is not the place to describe the campaigns of Rumaintsoff,
Patiomkin, and the rest, against Sweden and the Ottomans. Her own ideas
in the field of foreign policy we have already seen. After the
Revolution another policy, that of spurring on Gustavus and the Western
powers to a crusade against France, takes the first place. It gave them
something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she "wanted
elbow-room." The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious
for "elbow-room." Schemes of the kind were common enough in the
eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by everybody
else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times
of trouble and sickness. And John Sobieski had foretold the doom of
Poland a hundred years before. But it remains a blot upon her name. For
her final fate overtook Poland, not, as is commonly said, because of her
internal anarchy--sedulously fostered by the foreign powers--but because
that anarchy seemed about to disappear. The spirit of reform had
penetrated to Warsaw, and after the Constitution of May 3d Catharine was
afraid of a revival of the national forces similar to that which had
followed the reforms of 1772 in her neighbor Sweden. She was aided by
traitors from within, _a'quali era piu cara la servitu che la liberta
della loro patria_; and on the field of Maciejovitsy they were able to
cry, "_Finis Poloniae!_" No ques