Realising he could do nothing by force, he resorted to cunning. He encouraged tale-bearing. He instituted a special order of informers. This started universal chicanery and slander. “The informers see nothing—do not attend to their business, but live like parasites, shielding one another, because they all work into each other’s hands.” Knaves denounce knaves, impeachers denounce impeachers, informers informers, and the arch informer himself appears to be the arch knave.
A loathsome abyss, a bottomless cesspool, stables of Augeas which no Hercules can cleanse. Foulness penetrates everywhere—earth becomes mud, or dissolves like the snow in spring. The ancient rot re-appears on the surface. A stench spreads all over Russia, such as rose from the Poltava battlefield which drove the army away, choked by the stench of innumerable corpses.
Russian hearts are dull because darkness reigns in their minds. They refuse the good for they recognise it not. The nobles and the simple folk are well represented by Jeremy and Thomas, two proverbial characters: “Jeremy does not teach; and Thomas knows nothing.” Laws are powerless in that state of things.
“Our understanding is dull, our hands unskilled, the people of our nation are heavy-minded,” said the old people to him.
Once a Dutch boatswain told him the old legend:—
“Some sailors noticed in the ocean an unknown island. They moored their vessel to it, landed and made a fire to cook their food. Suddenly the earth began to shake and sank; they narrowly escaped being drowned; what seemed to them an island was in reality a sleeping whale.”
Was all this new enlightenment of Russia a fire made on the back of a leviathan, the inert mass of a sleeping people?
Cursed labours of a Sisyphus, labour similar to that of the convicts on Rogerwick, who build a breakwater; no sooner does a storm rise than in one hour the labours of years lie destroyed; and again they build, and again it is destroyed, and so on without end.
“We all see,” an intelligent peasant once told him, “that you are a great sovereign and labour hard, but with little success, because helpers are wanting. You with the strength of ten men are pulling up while a million pull down hill! What can come of this?” “A burden, a terrible burden,” groaned Peter on his couch, anguished as if the weight of Russia lay on him alone.
“Wherefore hast thou afflicted Thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in Thy sight, that Thou layest the burden of all this people upon me? Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that Thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which Thou swearest unto their fathers? I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And if Thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in Thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness!”