The Age of Political Experiments 311 mind. The Tzar Peter the Great (1682-1725) brought Russia into the arena of Western affairs. He built a new capital for his empire, Petersburg upon the Neva, that played the part of a window between Russia and Europe, and he set up his Versailles at Peterhof eighteen miles away, employing a French architect who gave him a terrace, fountains, cascades, picture gallery, park, and all the recognized appointments of Grand Monarchy. In Russia as in Prussia French became the language of the court. Unhappily placed between Austria, Prussia, and Russia was the Polish kingdom, an ill-organized state of great landed proprietors too jealous of their own individual grandeur to permit more than a nominal kingship to the monarch they elected. Her fate was division among these three neighbours, in spite of the efforts of France to retain her as an independent ally. Switzerland at this time was a group of republican cantons ; Venice was a republic ; Italy like so much of Germany was divided among minor dukes and princes. The pope ruled like a prince in the papal states, too fearful now of losing the allegiance of the remaining Catholic princes to interfere between them and their subjects or to remind the world of the com- monweal of Christendom. There remained indeed no common poUtical idea in Europe at all ; Europe was given over altogether to division and diversity. All these sovereign princes and republics carried on schemes of aggrandizement against each other. Each one of them pursued a " foreign policy " of aggression against its neighbours and of aggres- sive alliances. We Europeans still live to-day in the last phase of this age of the multifarious sovereign states, and still suffer from the hatreds, hostilities and suspicions it engendered. The history of this time becomes more and more manifestly " gossip," more and more unmeaning and wearisome to a modern intelligence. You are told of how this war was caused by this King's mistress, and how the jealousy of one minister for another caused that. A tittle-tattle of bribes and rivalries disgusts the intelligent student. The . more permanently significant fact is that in spite of the obstruction of a score of frontiers, reading and thought still spread and increased and inventions multiplied. The eighteenth century saw the appearance of a literature profoundly sceptical and critical of the courts and policies of the time. In such a book as Voltaire's Candide we have the expression of an infinite weariness with the planless confusion of the European world.
