she was a
philanthropist, but because she loved civilization. It was her
intellect, not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer. When she
severely punished and forever disgraced a lady of high rank for cruelty
to her serfs,--forty of whom had been tortured to death,--it was
because she had the educated instincts of a European, not an Asiatic,
and she had also the intelligence to realize that no state could be
made sound which rested upon a foundation of human misery. She
established a Russian Academy modeled after the French, its object
being to fix the rules for writing and speaking the Russian language
and to promote the study of Russian history. In other words, Catherine
was a reformer fully in sympathy with the best methods prevailing in
Western Europe. She was profoundly interested in the New Philosophy
and the intellectual movement in France, was in correspondence with
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and a student of the theories of
Rousseau.

Of course the influence exerted by French genius over Russian
civilization at this time did not penetrate far below the upper and
highly educated class; but there is no doubt it left a deep impress
upon the literature and art of the nation, and also modified Russian
characteristics by introducing religious tolerance and habits of
courtesy, besides making aspirations after social justice and political
liberty entirely respectable. Catherine's "Book of Instructions" to
the commission which was created by her to assist in making a new code
of laws contained political maxims which would satisfy advanced
reformers to-day; although when she saw later that the French
Revolution was their logical conclusion, she repudiated them, took
Voltaire's bust down from its pedestal, and had it thrown into a
rubbish heap. The work she was accomplishing for Russia was second
only to that of Peter the Great; and when she is reproached for not
having done more and for not having broken the chains forged by Boris
upon twenty million people, let it be remembered that she lived in the
eighteenth, and not the nineteenth, century; and that at that very time
Franklin and Jefferson were framing a constitution which sanctioned the
existence of negro slavery in an ideal republic!

A new generation had grown up in Poland, men not nobles nor serfs, but
a race of patriots familiar with the stirring literature of their
century. They had seen their land broken into fragments and then
ground fin