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To encourage trade and commerce, he laid the foundation of a 
system of river communications, and he issued the minutest in- 
structions for all kinds of occupations. He was the first to 
protect the forests, which he did in a characteristic way. At 
short intervals in the forest districts gallows were erected, on 
which depredators were hanged. As the people of one district 
still cut and stole the timber, the police made a descent on the 
place, hanged every tenth prisoner and knouted the rest. 
The Church and the Army engaged Peter’s attention. To the 
former he gave a new system of government, and to the latter a 
regular organisation, which had before been lacking, and a 
military spirit hitherto unknown. His reforms and changes 
extended even to the smallest detail, and are almost innumerable, 
and a life of labour, such as his, would have been possible only 
to a man of iron physique and giant strength. 
With all his failings, Peter was a great man. Born amid a 
people of Eastern ignorance, superstition and savagery, he raised 
himself by the force of his own vigour and genius to a place 
among the few to whom it has been given to change the face of 
an empire and of a continent. And if the transformation from 
the Asiatic to the Kuropean was incomplete, shall we not rather 
look at what he effected than at what still remained unchanged ? 
As he raised himself, so he raised his country. In spite of 
opposition, open and secret, from the people—who were indifferent, 
the ecclesiastics—who were hostile, and from the foes of his own 
household, Peter laid the foundation on which has risen modern 
Russia, and it was he—and he alone—who inspired the people 
with the ideas of duty, self-sacrifice and courage, which have 
made their greatness, as they made his. 

