It was a glorious and a heroic period but it was costly in the blood of Ukraine’s sons. They had no base of supplies, no formal government on which they could lean, no resources behind them. They followed their love of liberty, their disregard for death, their own elected leaders and made their names forever memorable in the books of heroes and of men of action. It was a true revolt of the human spirit against oppression and tyranny. It was a time when men were so busy acting that they had no inclination to think and to reflect. They were so conscious of the need of winning freedom and of gaining wealth and power by their heroism that they neglected much that would have helped them later. So the struggle continued until in the seventeenth century Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the greatest of the hetmans, endeavored to organize the Host and Ukraine on a national basis. He exchanged letters with Oliver Cromwell. He lived and worked at the time when the Puritans were mastering the New England wilderness, when the Thirty Years War was decimating Germany, when the first seeds of modern thought were sprouting all over Europe. Had he won his fight, had he lived a little longer to make Ukraine really free, a restored Ukraine and the Thirteen American Colonies would have appeared in history at one and the same time. The ideals of popular rule would have taken root in two widely scattered parts of the world. There would have been in Europe a free republic set up in a strategic part of the continent, and the history of Europe would have been changed. It was not to be. In an evil moment, Khmelnitsky put the Kozak Host under the jurisdiction of the Tsar of Moscow and from that moment on, it was torn to pieces by the mutual efforts of Moscow and Poland. Step by step, as the New World went on to increasing power and unanimity, as the American colonies became conscious of their mutual interests and of their growing strength, Ukraine fell into greater and greater chaos. Hetman fought against hetman, instigated by foreign rulers, and the great masses of the Kozaks, losing their own ideals, again reverted to dissatisfied and impoverished peasants while their officers tried to become aristocrats like the nobles around them. It was in vain that Mazepa tried to rouse the Kozaks to revolt for Ukrainian independence. It was in vain that one leader after another endeavored to bring back the old spirit of unity and of cooperation. The power of Moscow increased over the Kozak Host. More of the leaders were lost to the popular cause and despair reigned throughout the land as Peter the Great and Catherine tore away and abrogated the last of the Kozak rights.