This is not the place to describe the campaigns of Rumaintsoff, Patiomkin, and the rest, against Sweden and the Ottomans. Her own ideas in the field of foreign policy we have already seen. After the Revolution another policy, that of spurring on Gustavus and the Western powers to a crusade against France, takes the first place. It gave them something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she "wanted elbow-room." The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious for "elbow-room." Schemes of the kind were common enough in the eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by everybody else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times of trouble and sickness. And John Sobieski had foretold the doom of Poland a hundred years before. But it remains a blot upon her name. For her final fate overtook Poland, not, as is commonly said, because of her internal anarchy--sedulously fostered by the foreign powers--but because that anarchy seemed about to disappear. The spirit of reform had penetrated to Warsaw, and after the Constitution of May 3d Catharine was afraid of a revival of the national forces similar to that which had followed the reforms of 1772 in her neighbor Sweden. She was aided by traitors from within, _a'quali era piu cara la servitu che la liberta della loro patria_; and on the field of Maciejovitsy they were able to cry, "_Finis Poloniæ!_" No question has been more obscured. The fashion of liberal thought has changed, the history, like that of town and gown, has been written by the victorious aggressors, and Poland is become the rendezvous of the political sophistries, as it has been the cockpit of the political ruffianism, of all Europe. But Catharine could boast that she had pushed the frontiers of Russia farther than any sovereign since Ivan the Terrible. "I came to Russia a poor girl. Russia has dowered me richly, but I have paid her back with Azov, the Crimea, and the Ukraine."