r, own most
of the land, formerly held in common.]

The firm organisation which Central Europe gained under the French
Emperor's hammer-like blows served to falsify the prophecy; and the
stream of Russian conquest, dammed up on the west by the
newly-consolidated strength of Prussia and Austria, set strongly towards
Asia. Pride at her overthrow of the great conqueror in 1812 had
quickened the national consciousness of Russia; and besides this
praiseworthy motive there was another perhaps equally potent, namely,
the covetousness of her ruling class. The Memoirs written by her
bureaucrats and generals reveal the extravagance, dissipation, and
luxury of the Court circles. Fashionable society had as its main
characteristic a barbaric and ostentatious extravagance, alike in
gambling and feasting, in the festivals of the Court or in the scarcely
veiled debauchery of its devotees. Baron Loewenstern, who moved in its
higher ranks, tells of cases of a license almost incredible to those who
have not pried among the garbage of the Court of Catharine II. This
recklessness, resulting from the tendency of the Muscovite nature, as of
the Muscovite climate, to indulge in extremes, begot an imperious need
of large supplies of money; and, ground down as were the serfs on the
broad domains of the nobles, the resulting revenues were all too scanty
to fill up the financial void created by the urgent needs of St.
Petersburg, Gatchina, or Monte Carlo. Larger domains had to be won in
order to outvie rivals or stave off bankruptcy; and these new domains
could most easily come by foreign conquest.

For an analogous reason, the State itself suffered from land hunger. Its
public service was no less corrupt than inefficient. Large sums
frequently vanished, no one knew whither; but one infallible cure for
bankruptcy was always at hand, namely, conquests over Poles, Turks,
Circassians, or Tartars. To this Catharine II. had looked when she
instituted the vicious practice of paying the nobles for their services
at Court; and during her long career of conquest she greatly developed
the old Muscovite system of meeting the costs of war out of the domains
of the vanquished, besides richly dowering the Crown, and her generals
and favoured courtiers. One of the Russian Ministers, referring to the
notorious fact that his Government made war for the sake of booty as
well as glory, said to a Frenchman, "We have remained somewhat Asiatic
in that respect[278]."