Russia of 1812 and the Russia of 1709 was greater than the disparity between the power of Charles and the might of Napoleon. "If that heroic king," said Fouché, "had not, like your imperial majesty, half Europe in arms to back him, neither had his opponent, the Czar Peter, 400,000 soldiers and 50,000 Cossacks." The historians who describe the state of the Muscovite empire when revolutionary and imperial France encountered it, narrate with truth and justice how, "at the epoch of the French Revolution, this immense empire, comprehending nearly half of Europe and Asia within its dominions, inhabited by a patient and indomitable race, ever ready to exchange the luxury and adventure of the South for the hardships and monotony of the North, was daily becoming more formidable to the liberties of Europe. * * The Russian infantry had then long been celebrated for its immovable firmness. Her immense population, amounting then in Europe alone to nearly thirty-five millions, afforded an inexhaustible supply of men. Her soldiers, inured to heat and cold from their infancy, and actuated by a blind devotion to their Czar, united the steady valor of the English to the impetuous energy of the French troops."[1] So, also, we read how the haughty aggressions of Bonaparte "went to excite a national feeling from the banks of the Borysthenes to the wall of China, and to unite against him the wild and uncivilized inhabitants of an extended empire, possessed by a love to their religion, their government, and their country, and having a character of stern devotion, which he was incapable of estimating."[2] But the Russia of 1709 had no such forces to oppose to an assailant. Her whole population then was below sixteen millions; and, what is far more important, this population had neither acquired military spirit nor strong nationality, nor was it united in loyal attachment to its ruler.
Peter had wisely abolished the old regular troops of the empire, the Strelitzes; but the forces which he had raised in their stead on a new and foreign plan, and principally officered with foreigners, had, before the Swedish invasion, given no proof that they could be relied on. In numerous encounters with the Swedes, Peter's soldiery had run like sheep before inferior numbers. Great discontent, also, had been excited among all classes of the community by the arbitrary changes which their great emperor introduced, many of which clashed with the most cherished na-
