There is, however, yet another factor--a factor which, whilst accounting for the existence of an intelligentia, or a coterie of intellectuals, and of an utterly ignorant mass, will also throw some light upon the intellectual development of this very intelligentia and explain the reasons which compelled it to choose certain channels by which it sends forth the currents of its thoughts. This factor is the despotic government of the czars. If Russia’s unhappy past and Peter’s good intentions but great blunders produced the present state of intellectual development in that country, the government of the Reformer’s successors has done its very best to preserve this condition. The continuous policy of the Russian government to civilise by means of the knout has on the one hand brought about the result that not Russia but only a few Russians evolved intellectually and, on the other, it has given a certain direction to the thought and intellectual productions of these few. Even during the reign of Peter I or Catherine II, when the spirit of civilisation began to move its wings, independent thought has had to sustain a fierce struggle against authority. In the most civilised countries of western Europe ever and anon a cross-current of reaction traverses the stream of intellectual evolution: narrow-minded zealots, hypocritical bigots, false patriots, literary Gibeonites, gossiping old women arrayed in the mantles of philosophers, do their best to put fetters on the independent thought of man, to nip the free and natural intellectual development in the very bud by forcing it under the iron grip of tradition and authority. These reactionary tendencies of the lovers of darkness are only exceptions, and will lead thought for a while into a side channel, but cannot stop the triumphant march onwards. Not so in Russia.