the structure of this enormous State. Peter the Great, who was more than any other man the creator of modern Russia, saw clearly that the only way of holding this inchoate State-mass together was to call into existence a huge administrative machine, and he saw equally clearly that, if such a machine was not itself to become a disruptive force through the personal ambition and self-aggrandisement of its members, it must be framed on democratic and not aristocratic principles. As Mr. Maurice Baring puts it, "Peter the Great introduced the democratic idea that service was everything, rank nothing. He had it proclaimed to the whole gentry that any gentleman, in any circumstances whatsoever and to whatever family he belonged, should salute and yield place to any officer. The gentleman served as a private soldier and became an officer, but a private soldier who did not belong to the nobility, and who attained the rank of a commissioned officer, became, _ipso facto_, a member of the hereditary nobility.... In the civil service he introduced the same democratic system. He divided it into three sections: military, civil, and court. Every section was divided into fourteen ranks, or _Chins_; the attainment of the eighth class conferred the privilege of hereditary nobility, even though those who received it might have been of the humblest origin. He hereby replaced the aristocratic hierarchy of pedigree by a democratic hierachy of service. Promotion was made solely according to service; lineage counted for nothing. There was no social difference, however wide, which could not be levelled by means of State service." This is partly what was meant when it was stated in the last paragraph that Russia was socially the most democratic of modern countries. The system established by Peter the Great exists to-day. Russia is governed, not by a feudal nobility like that which ground the faces of the poor in France before the revolution of 1789, nor by a number of capitalists who live by exploiting the workers; for neither feudal nobility nor capitalism (as yet) has any real power in Russia. She is governed by a civil service, and by a civil service more democratic than our own, where the higher posts are as a rule only open to members of the upper and middle classes, less exclusive than that of India, where the higher officials are nearly all recruited from the members of an alien race--a civil service, in short, whose only close parallel is the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine the Roman Church as a secular institution, with a monarch at its head ruling by hereditary right instead of an elected president like the Pope, and you get a very fair idea of the Russian Government machine. All that we associate with the word aristocracy in the West, the hereditary principle, primo-geniture, the accumulation of the land and capital of the country in the hands of a small class, the spirit of caste, the traditions