Suddenly from the inventor,[C] pulling over some old dust-covered
machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were
natural indeed. In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning
irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself:
specimens of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there
unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter
and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in
America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris
Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying
statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old,
forgotten machine of Peter's.
[Footnote C: The late Samuel Colt.]
Yet, though Peter fought so well, and thought so well, he made some
mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For
in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme
lack,--lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.
Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster
Hall,--"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia,
and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;"--or when, at
Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his
servants to be hanged in order to test it;--or, in his reviews and
parade-fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the
buttons off their bayonets.
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