occurs in such circumstances, a Christian copy of the Tartar province. From Ivan Vassilievitch to citizen Benin this Mongol influence, the idolatry of the omnipotent monarch, a tyrant, decreeing by « yarliks-ucazes » or by Communist decrees, remained unchanged. Under a Czar of an Asiatic type, ascending to a Djinghis Khan, the Slav subjects had no rights in their local popular life. Nor have they more today.
Peter the Great europeanised the Asiatic khanate of his predecessors. By cutting the beards of the boyards and by introducing the French « justaucorps », by organising a navy, by translating books of elementary mathematics into Russian he imagined that he had created a new State. Actually it was only a blurred image of its German and Swedish models. And still the Slav masses, living in their village-groups, had no part in the government of the country. They had not yet come of age.
From one despotic illusion to another, Catherine II « frenchified » the inheritance of her stronger predecessor. Her imperious philanthropy would have disposed of, and arranged, all things and all human beings, without their knowledge or permission, on the lines of the French philosophy of her time. By the time Diderot, as a representative of this doctrine, bidden in haste to Russia, had chosen the place which he designed to be the scene of his future work and had arranged and furnished the rooms, but he was sent back, with his due rewards and yet more compliments, to his country. Though much that was French remained, yet up to the end of the 18th century, after fifty generations from the birth of the race, it had failed to produce as much as one solid political idea.
Alexander the First too would have created a new Russia, first in the Napoleonic sense, conducted by a monarchical genius, and then a romantic one, upon the
