In France, in England, in Germany, in all western Europe, civilisation, the moral and intellectual evolution, was a natural phenomenon, the effect of previous causes. In Russia, civilisation was the outcome of a sudden revolution, the slavish, reluctant and half-hearted compliance with the commands of an individual will. The former was natural, the latter artificial. An evolution is a slow change, an unconscious and imperceptible process, finding a state prepared for innovation, a soil, furrowed and fertile, ready to receive the seed and to bring forth fruit. A revolution, on the other hand, is a radical, sudden change which seldom succeeds and, in most cases, calls forth reactions. In Western Europe there was, as we have see above, a time of transition from the barbarous to the civilised state. The morning of the Renaissance had dawned upon mediæval Europe and tinted with orient colours the sombre sky. The first rays appeared on the horizon of the Italian poets, dissipating the darkness here and there. The sun gradually rose higher and higher, penetrated the houses of the people and woke them (who had been lulled to sleep by the mysterious whisperings of superstition) from their prolonged slumbers. They awoke, opened their windows and allowed the light of the morning to penetrate into their dark abodes. Not so in Russia. There the people were suddenly awakened, dragged out from the utter darkness, without any transition, into the broad midday of an artificial light. They opened their eyes, but the light was too strong, too glaring; so they shut them again. Peter wanted to jump over three centuries and catch up with Europe. He established a fleet without Russian sailors, an administration with foreign administrators, an academy of science in a land without elementary schools. He began a race with Europe but his people could not follow him. He borrowed everything from Europe and instead of giving his people a chance to develop naturally and freely, he crushed the spirit of independence and introduced a knout civilisation. Everything had to be done by order. He forced his people to swallow Europeanism. The bulk of his subjects, however, could not digest it. The consequence was that they could not follow the few, and remained far behind them. The gulf therefore between the few, who form the present intelligentia, and the great mass--a gulf which was but narrow towards the end of the sixteenth century when by way of Poland and Livonia a glimpse of the western sun penetrated into Russia--suddenly widened considerably. Thus the origin of the striking phenomenon which Russia offers in her intellectually high developed intelligentia and her uneducated, ignorant masses is to be sought in Russia’s past, in the absence of a period of transition, and in Peter’s misunderstanding the process of European civilisation, in his admiration for the effects, but utter ignorance of the causes that brought about these effects.