BERIKG^'S GREAT NORTHERN EXPEDITION. 71 



with a resolution to prefer formal charges against him 

 before the Senate. 



Only a new state, as the Russian then was, only a 

 government that recently had seen the will of one ener- 

 getic man turn topsy-turvy a whole people^s mode of life, 

 and yet had preserved a fanciful faith in Peter the Great's 

 teachings — his supreme disregard for obstacles, — only 

 such a government could even think of heaping such 

 mountains of enterprises one upon the other, or demand 

 that any one man, and a foreigner at that, should carry 

 them into execution. Peter's spirit undoubtedly hovered 

 over these plans, but the marble sarcophagus in the 

 church of St. Peter and St. Paul had long since received 

 his earthly remains, and without his personal energy the 

 Senate's plans were but the projects of a dazzled fancy. 

 On paper the Senate might indeed refer Bering to 

 various ways and means ; it might enjoin upon the 

 Siberian authorities to do everything in their power to 

 promote the progress of the various expeditions ; it might 

 direct its secretaries to prepare very humane declama- 

 tion denouncing the practice of any violence against, or 

 oppression of, the weak nomadic tribes in the East ; but 

 it could not by a few pen-strokes increase the natural 

 resources of Siberia, or change the unwillingness of the 

 local authorities to accede to the inordinate demands 

 which the nautical expedition necessarily had to make, 

 nor could it make roads in the wild forest-regions where 

 only the Yakut and Tunguse roamed about. The Sen- 

 ate's humanitarian phrases were of but little significance 

 to the explorers when it was found necessary to compel 

 the nomads of the East to supply what the government 



