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History

Indeed, there was not an offence against the law, from presentation of an inopportune petition for a permit to fell an oak tree or a "mast-head" spruce of more than the statutory height to the failure of a dvorianin to attend an annual inspection, or to a mercantile transaction in Russian cloth, for which he did not ordain, variously, confiscation of property, loss of civil rights, the knut, the galleys, or the gallows either, that is to say, political extinction or physical death.

And of this extravagance of legal chastisement the inevitable result was both to strengthen hardihood in wrongdoing and to bring about such a perplexity of the subjects mentaHty, such an intellectual neurasthenia, such a sense of spiritual oppression, as was well described by Apraxin, one of Peters most zealous assistants, when, in 1716, he wrote to Makarov, Peters private secretary: "We are wandering, in all things, like unto blind men, and know not what to do, in that everywhere there are coming about great undoings of men, and unto none is it known whither best they may turn, or how best they may act.

From nowhere, moreover, can money now be gathered, for all things are estopped.

" In short, it fell to Peters reforms to navigate such a sea of internal ferment as more than once, owing to their novelty, broke into a violent tempest.

Four serious rebellions, and at least some three or four conspiracies>- occurred, as upheavals endeavouring to defend the old regime and its prejudices and ideas.