The influence of Germany at the Russian Court was strengthened by the influence of Germany on the Russian bureaucracy. An agricultural community without a middle class, Russia has had to recruit her Civil Services almost entirely from the outside and mainly from Germany, and more especially from the German Baltic provinces of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland. Teutonic barons from those Baltic provinces have filled the higher ranks of the Diplomatic Service and of the Civil Service for a hundred and fifty years. The Russian Tsars found the German barons far more serviceable tools than the Russian boiars. In a previous age one Emperor after another had been removed by a rebellious aristocracy. The highest nobles in the land had been implicated in the Decabrist conspiracy at the end of Alexander I.’s reign. Even under Alexander II. there were always a few members of the nobility to be found as accomplices in the revolutionary plots. But there never was one single German from the Baltic provinces implicated in a conspiracy against reaction. It is easy to understand, therefore, why a Russian autocrat should have preferred the services of the German Baltic barons. The Russian nobleman is casual, lavish, a bad economist, easygoing, generous, and he is corrupt because easygoing and generous. He is also much more independent. The Junker is punctual, precise, disciplined, generally poor, always ambitious. He is also tolerably honest. He is the ideal bureaucrat. XI. German influence has been no less dominant in the Russian academies and in scientific institutions. The Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg was organized on the pattern of the Academy of Berlin. It was an official institution with high privileges, and it remained consistently German. Until recently its proceedings were published in the German language, and German scientists were invariably preferred rather than Russian scientists. Mendelieff, one of the most creative scientific minds of his generation, was a member of every European academy except the Academy of Petersburg. The Germans have been an even greater power in the Russian Universities. They took full advantage of the prestige which German science had acquired in Europe, and they largely filled the ranks of the liberal professions. German doctors, German veterinary surgeons, German _Feldschers_, German foresters, German engineers, were to be found in every part of the Empire. A casual reading of the Post Office directories of Moscow, or Petersburg, or Kiev, provides a most instructive commentary on the extent of the German domination. XII.