If she could, she would have abolished ignorance and cruelty in the land, not because she was a philanthropist, but because she loved civilization.

It was her intellect, not her heart, that made Catherine a reformer.

When she severely punished and forever disgraced a lady of high rank for cruelty to her serfs,--forty of whom had been tortured to death,--it was because she had the educated instincts of a European, not an Asiatic, and she had also the intelligence to realize that no state could be made sound which rested upon a foundation of human misery.

She established a Russian Academy modeled after the French, its object being to fix the rules for writing and speaking the Russian language and to promote the study of Russian history.

In other words, Catherine was a reformer fully in sympathy with the best methods prevailing in Western Europe.