Reform of the _ex cathedra_ sort was just then in the air. From the Tagus to the Dnieper, and from Copenhagen to the Vatican, Europe was crowded with paternal monarchs and earnest ministers, who were willing to do almost everything for the people and nothing by them. The world had not seen statesmen so sincere, enlightened, and plausible. A generation later, on the meeting of the National Assembly, the despotic reformation of Montesquieu and Voltaire will still seem about to be translated into action. Men read their Rousseau: soon they will understand him; they will also understand that _Non de nobis sine nobis_, which was the haughty motto of the Hungarian magnates. But her attention soon became diverted. She was not, as Gunning thought, insincere, only fickle; she wanted patience and continuity of aim. The "States-General" had produced an excellent effect in the world, and, in fact, had afforded her information afterward turned to account. Her eye is on the Turk: as with the second Pitt, had it not been for this cursed war we should have seen greater things. "Beginnings--only beginnings!" exclaims an eye-witness, "there are plenty of sketches to be seen, but where is the finished picture?" Another reports that shoals of academies and secondary schools bear witness to Catharine's enthusiasm for education, but that some exist only on paper, while others seem to have everything except scholars. Things are done hastily, and without just measure or proportion; the imitative talent of the Russian does not seem to carry him quite far enough. At her death, says a historian who wrote eight years after it, most of her foundations were already in ruins; everything seemed to have been abandoned before completion. Yet we must not forget that liberal ideas were in themselves a revelation to the Russia of her days, and that after a succession of contemptible sovereigns she appeared as the first worthy successor of Peter. It was already something for a woman there to be governed by large social conceptions; has it not been said even elsewhere that the politics of women are proper names? You may say what you will: she saved the European tradition of Peter the Great, and was in a sense the creator of modern Russia.