Peter the Great effaced all the distinctions that were characteristic of the preceding epoch. By compelling every landholder to enter the service of the state, and by establishing a uniform law of inheritance for all real estate belonging to the nobility, he merged in one patrimonies and fees. On the other hand, by imposing the poll tax upon peasants, and by making the landholder responsible for the exact payment of this tax, he put slaves and serfs upon a common footing, and made the latter personally dependent upon the landlord. His successors restricted the civil rights of the peasants and took away from them the right to sue their masters. At the same time the latter were granted the right to exile their peasants to Siberia, and to sell them, even where such sale entailed the separation of the wife from her husband, of the child from its parents. On the other hand, after the time of Peter the Great, the duty of service was gradually relaxed, and at last definitively abolished by Peter III in 1762. It was by this ukase that private property in land and serfdom were finally recognized in Russia as institutions of private law.[7] But immediately after the “Charter to the Nobility” was granted by Peter III, the question of emancipation began to agitate the peasants. Three generations were too short a period in which to implant in the minds of the peasantry the new principles brought into social relations by the St. Petersburg Emperors. The conservative mind of the peasant was wedded to the old customs of the Muscovite common law. He knew no Emperor; for him there was still a Czar, who owned all the lands of his country for the good of his people. The gentleman was bound to serve the Czar; the peasant was bound to provide the gentleman with the necessary means; hence bond serfdom and fee. And was the idea really so obsolete? Were not the gentlemen daily granted large estates for services they had rendered to the Czar? Now, since the Czar in his grace has freed the gentleman from service, there is no longer any ground upon which the gentleman can be justified in detaining the land in his possession, nor is there any reason for keeping the peasant in dependence upon the gentleman. Consequently “Land and Liberty!” (_Zemlya ee Volya!_) It is now plain enough why the nobility conspired to assassinate the Emperor Peter III Theodorovitch. After the “dear father” had narrowly escaped his fate, the lords declared him dead; but fortunately he succeeded at last, after eleven years of exile, in recruiting an army of loyal subjects to help him in taking lawful possession of his throne, usurped by his perfidious wife. The war over, the people will be graciously vouchsafed “Land and Liberty.”