Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter VIII.
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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
energetic 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
declamation 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
Senate’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
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