But “what a sight for the nation itself, a calm spectator of these events! On one side, the grandson of Peter I. dethroned and put to death; on the other, the grandson of the Czar Ivan languishing in fetters; while a Princess of Anhalt usurps the throne of their ancestors, clearing her way to it by a regicide.”
As a sovereign, Catherine displayed marked ability. She effected several useful reforms, established important institutions, encouraged national intercourse, founded schools and hospitals, and erected arsenals and manufactories.
During her lifetime she published a list of two hundred and forty-five cities which she had founded in her dominions. This sounds very grand; but we may look as vainly for her cities as for those of Babylonian Semiramis. In some instances she merely indicated the spot where she intended a city should be erected; in others, she gave the name of a city to some hamlet or village.
When she made her famous voyage down the Dnieper, in 1787, Joseph II. accompanied her to lay the foundations of a city to be called, after her name, Ekaterinaslof, and which, in her imagination, already rivalled St. Petersburg. The empress laid the first stone with great pomp, and the emperor laid the second. On returning from the ceremony, Joseph remarked, in his dry, epigrammatic manner: “The empress and I have this day achieved a great work; she has laid the first stone of a great city, and I have laid the last.” His speech was prophetic. The city never proceeded farther, nor was it thought of again.
Catherine had one overmastering passion,—ambition; and since the basis of her character was selfishness, her ambition began and ended with herself. She was shrewd in principle, astute in judgment, hard in character, and hopelessly corrupt in morals. But “she knew how to make herself looked up to, if not with respect and liking, at least with deference; and Frederick the Great, Louis XV., Maria Theresa, and George III., each in their turn, learned to regard her acts with attention.”
The principal fame of Catherine rests on her celebrated code of laws, and on her title of legislatrix of her dominions.
“If,” said Frederick of Prussia, “several women as sovereigns have obtained a deserved celebrity,—Semiramis for her conquests, Elizabeth of England for her political sagacity, Maria Theresa for her astonishing firmness of character,—to Catherine alone may be given the title of a female law-giver.”
But how much of this was fulsome flattery and how much honest praise, it is not very difficult to discern, considering the gross nature of Catherine, and the cunning diplomacy of Frederick.
Catherine is said to have doubled the resources and revenues of her empire. Undoubtedly she increased the resources by the extension of her commerce; and by her conquests over the Turks, which threw open the trade and navigation of the Mediterranean, she added greatly to the power of Russia; but she exhausted her resources much faster than she could create them, and she wasted her revenues more quickly than she could replenish them. She doubled and trebled the taxes of her oppressed people, and the legal pillage of her tyrannical officers drove whole provinces to desperation.
“Kings and queens,” she wrote in her letter to Queen Marie Antoinette, “ought to proceed in their career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her course unimpeded by the howling of the dogs.” A fine sentiment truly, and one which she took good care should not grow dull for want of use during her lifetime.