was a fatal error.

There were slaves enough before. It was unnecessary to degrade the nobles. But the more closely we analyze Peter's character, the more cogently we are compelled to conclude, that his actuating motive was rather his own fame than the good of his country. A great peculiarity of his ambition was, that, though possessed of eminent military talents and highly successful in his campaigns, he seems to have cared but little for the certaminis gaudia; to have taken but small delight in battles and victories for themselves; to have cared little for conquest, beyond what he required for his settled purpose. Conquering, he never aspires to be a conqueror; victorious over the greatest general of the age, he is ready to sheathe his sword as soon as the object of the contest is attained. His ambition was to be a founder, and he never, in victory or defeat, was once turned aside from his purpose. He was determined to advance his empire to the ocean, to create a new capital, and to implant there and throughout his empire the elements of European civilization. If his ambition had flown a little higher, had he determined to regenerate his people, the real civilization of his empire would have followed sooner than it is now likely to do. Of this he probably never dreamed. He was a despot throughout. He might have found other matters in England worthy of his attention, other institutions as intimately connected with civilization as the English naval architecture; but he appears to have been completely indifferent to the great spectacle presented to an autocrat by a constitutional kingdom. "Are these all lawyers?" said he, one day, when visiting the courts at Westminster. "What can be the use of so many lawyers? I have but two in my empire, and I mean to hang one of them as soon as I get back." He certainly might as well have hung them both; a country without law has very little need of lawyers.

It was because his country was inhabited by slaves, and not by a people, that it was necessary, in every branch of his great undertaking, to go into such infinitesimal details. Our admiration of the man's power is, to be sure, increased by a contemplation of the extraordinary versatility of his genius, its wide grasp, and its minute perception; but we regret to see so much elephantine labor thrown away. As he felt himself to be the only man in the empire, so in his power of

He felt that he

labor he rises to a demigod, a Hercules. must do every thing himself, and he did every thing. He fills every military post, from drummer to general, from cabin-boy to admiral; with his own hand he builds ships of the line, and navigates them himself in storm and battle; he superintends every manufactory, every academy, every hospital, every prison; with his own hand he pulls teeth and draws up commercial treaties, wins all his battles with his own sword, at the head of his army, and sings in the choir as chief bishop and head of his church, models all his forts, sounds all his harbours, draws maps of his own dominions, all with his own hand, -regulates the treasury of his empire and the account-books of his shop-keepers, teaches his subjects how to behave themselves in assemblies, prescribes the length of their coat-skirts, and dictates their religious creed. If, instead of contenting himself with slaves who only aped civilization, he had striven to create a people, capable and worthy of culture, he might have spared himself all these minute details; he would have produced less striking, instantaneous effects, but his work would have been more durable, and his fame more elevated. His was one of the monarch minds, who coin their age, and stamp it with their image and superscription; but his glory would have been greater, if he had thought less of himself, and more of the real interests of his country. If he had attempted to convert his subjects from cattle into men, he need not have been so eternally haunted by the phantom of returning barbarism, destroying after his death all the labor of his lifetime, and which he could exorcise only by shedding the blood of his son. Viewed from this position, his colossal grandeur dwindles. It seems to us that he might have been so much more, that his possible seem to dwarf his actual achievements. He might have been the creator and the lawgiver of a people. He was, after all, only a tyrant and a city-builder. Even now, his successors avert their eyes from the West. The city of his love is already in danger from more potent elements than water. New and dangerous ideas fly through that magnificent western gateway. When the portal is closed, the keys thrown into the Baltic, and the discarded Moscow again embraced, how much fruit will be left from the foreign seeds transplanted? When the Byzantine empire is restored, perhaps we shall

see their ripened development; the Russians of the lower empire will be a match for the Greeks who preceded them.

Still, we repeat, it is difficult to judge him justly. He seems to have felt a certain mission confided to him by a superior power. His object he accomplished without wavering, without precipitation, without delay. We look up to him as to a giant, as we see him striding over every adversary, over every obstacle in his path. He seems in advance of his country, of his age, of himself. In his exterior he is the great prince, conqueror, reformer; in his interior, the Muscovite, the barbarian. He was conscious of it himself. "I wish to reform my empire," he exclaimed, upon one occasion, "and I cannot reform myself." In early life, his pleasures were of the grossest character; he was a hard drinker, and was quarrelsome in his cups. He kicked and cuffed his ministers, on one occasion was near cutting the throat of Lefort in a paroxysm of drunken anger, and was habitually caning Prince Menzikoff. But after all, he did reform himself, and, in the latter years of his life, his habits were abstemious and simple, and his days and nights were passed in labors for his country and his fame.

It is difficult to judge him justly. Perhaps it would have been impossible to have planted even the germ of civil, or even social, liberty in such a wilderness as Russia was at his accession. It was something to lift her ever so little above the waves of barbarism, where he found her " many fathoms deep." He accomplished a great deal. He made Russia a maritime country, gave her a navy and a commercial capital, and quadrupled her revenue; he destroyed the Strelitzes, he crushed the Patriarch, he abolished the monastic institutions of his empire. If he had done nothing else, he would, for these great achievements, deserve the eternal gratitude of his country.

ART. II. Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, at the Commencement of the Second Session of the Twenty-eighth Congress, December 3, 1844. Washington: Printed by Gales & Seaton. 1844. pp. 702.

WE would again, at the risk of being read by only a few of those who look over this Journal, solicit the attention of the public to some of the military concerns of the nation. The many-paged document, the title of which is placed at the head of this article, is not likely to be read by any; parts of it will be glanced at by a few. And yet its contents are highly important. They contain much information which should be generally known. And those who submit to the task of rendering that information sufficiently attractive to be noticed may be said to perform a beneficial service to the public. In most cases, samples may be hung out, which will give a tolerable idea of the bales within; and many will cast an eye upon the former who would not think of examining the latter. We will not attempt to answer the often propounded question, whether these public documents could not be made more brief, convenient, and popular, other words, more useful. As they now come forth, they are almost wholly useless. They are not generally even laid aside, uncut, for the contingent benefit of future reference; but fall into the receptacles of waste paper, like the newspaper of yesterday. It is half amusing and half deplorable to witness the residuary documents which are found lumbering, for a short time, the rooms of an ex-member of congress. A retired stationer, who has not yet sold off the remnants of his stock, is not in a more littered and encumbered condition.

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The document before us has more than seven hundred pages, besides unpaged matter, such as returns, printed out in all their length and breadth. There is much of this with which we have nothing to do. The reports which accompany the report of the secretary of war form, however, more than five hundred and fifty of these pages. But we may deduct from these more than two hundred pages which belong to the Indian department; with these we have no concern; and we may hazard the remark, that the public, in

general, has as little. It may well be asked, why such a mass of unimportant details should be printed each year at the public expense. The "one hundred " reports relating to the Indian department, filling nearly two hundred pages, might as well have remained in the pigeon-holes of the Indian commissioner. They show the manner in which a great variety of small agencies, in every nook and corner of the frontier, have discharged a benevolent trust, and that the Indians-those quasi wards of the government—are under a careful guardianship. But if each bureau were to swell its communications to its proper chief after a similar fashion,— were to dilate, or dilute, its matter after this manner, congressional printers would have as much presswork as they could do, and the public mails more documents than they could carry. If there be no process of distillation at the bureaux, to extract the spirit, leaving the crude matter behind, we might expect a more sharpsighted discrimination in congress, which professes to sift all matters submitted to it. But it is probable that whatever leaves the bureaux passes, like a sealed package, through all its stages of transmission, unread and unseen, until it reaches the printer's hands, where there is no motive to curtail, nor power to do so, even if the motive arose.

We turn over all the pages of this document until we come to the report of the secretary of war. Our war secretaries have latterly had but little time to learn the duties of their station. During the last four or five years, they have shifted as often as the almanac. Occasionally, they have not even outlived the annuals. Under such variable circumstances, experience has not been looked for, being a plant of somewhat slow growth. Fortunately, the welfare of the army does not depend for its stability upon this high functionary. He may go out and come in with each season; he may be as deciduous as the leaves; and yet the military establishment, and the national defence, so far as it relies on that establishment, remain the same. There is a permanency in the command of the army, and in all the subordinate departments connected with its administration, that makes it nearly independent of these fluctuations. would suggest a change in the present subordination of the military bureaux at Washington. Having been established, we believe, at a time when there was no commander-in-chief

We