advantages with which he set out. If it is a crime to steal the bread from a child's month, it is scarcely less a crime to deprive him of the education that is his natural right; and this is the charge that must be laid to the account of the ambitious regent and her unscrupulous minister.
With the commencement of the reign of Peter the Great we enter on the modern history of Russia. The events noticed in the immediately preceding chapters will have disproved the popular notion that Russia was ever entirely isolated and dissevered from the comity of European nations, excepting during the dismal three centuries of the Mongol possession. Previous to that time she had been in close contact with Constantinople. Both in Church and in State at the great centres of Kiev and Novgorod Russian civilisation had been in line with the civilisation of Eastern Europe. In some respects it was even more advanced than that of Western Europe at the break-up of the Roman Empire and during the wars of the barons. The Mongol invasion had swept much of this culture away, checked the course of national development, shut off the Sclavonic population from Greek and Teutonic Europe, and turned Russia into a semi-Asiatic country. It took many generations for her people to recover from so huge and crushing a calamity. The vastness of the territory of Russia, the thinness of its widely scattered populations, and the remoteness of most of them from the centres of enlightenment, have always resulted and must still result in great differences in the social conditions of the people. Necessarily the mass of the outlying peasants are only indirectly affected, if at all influenced, by the advance of culture in the towns. Religiously as well as socially, most of Russia is still in the Middle Ages, that is to say, in the period before the Renaissance.
But in Moscow, Rostoff, Novgorod, and other great towns there was a consciousness of the larger world long before Peter came on the scene. Ivan the Terrible took decided steps towards bringing Western culture into Russia. The Romanoff dynasty followed on similar lines.
