heir ideas.

Neither the Sea of Azof, nor the Black Sea, nor the Caspian Sea, could
open to Peter this direct passage to Europe. Besides, during his
lifetime still Taganrog, Azof, the Black Sea, with its new-formed
Russian fleets, ports, and dockyards, were again abandoned or given up
to the Turk. The Persian conquest, too, proved a premature enterprise.
Of the four wars which fill the military life of Peter the Great, his
first war, that against Turkey, the fruits of which were lost in a
second Turkish war, continued in one respect the traditionary struggle
with the Tartars. In another respect, it was but the prelude to the war
against Sweden, of which the second Turkish war forms an episode and the
Persian war an epilogue. Thus the war against Sweden, lasting during
twenty-one years, almost absorbs the military life of Peter the Great.
Whether we consider its purpose, its results, or its endurance, we may
justly call it _the_ war of Peter the Great. His whole creation hinges
upon the conquest of the Baltic coast.

Now, suppose we were altogether ignorant of the details of his
operations, military and diplomatic. The mere fact that the conversion
of Muscovy into Russia was brought about by its transformation from a
half-Asiatic inland country into the paramount maritime Power of the
Baltic, would it not enforce upon us the conclusion that England, the
greatest maritime Power of that epoch--a maritime Power lying, too, at
the very gates of the Baltic, where, since the middle of the 17th
century, she had maintained the attitude of supreme arbiter--that
England must have had her hand in this great change, that she must have
proved the main prop or the main impediment of the plans of Peter the
Great, that during the long protracted and deadly struggle between
Sweden and Russia she must have turned the balance, that if we do not
find her straining every nerve in order to save the Swede we may be sure
of her having employed all the means at her disposal for furthering the
Muscovite? And yet, in what is commonly called history, England does
hardly appear on the plan of this grand drama, and is represented as a
spectator rather than as an actor. Real history will show that the
Khans of the Golden Horde were no more instrumental in realizing the
plans of Ivan III. and his predecessors than the rulers of England were
in realizing the plans of Peter I. and his successors.

The pamphlets which we have reprinted, written as they