S A I S A I 195 the then name for what is now Vasilyevskiy Island. By founding St Petersburg Peter I. only restored the trade to its old but dis- carded channels. The system of canals for connecting the upper Volga and the Dnieper with the great lakes of the north completed the work ; the commercial mouth of the Volga was transferred to the Gulf of Finland, and St Petersburg became the export harbour for more than half Russia. Foreigners hastened thither to take possession of the growing export trade, to the exclusion of the Russians ; and to this circumstance the Russian capital is indebted for its cosmopolitan character. But its present extensive and west- European aspect has not been achieved, nor is it maintained, without a vast expenditure of the national resources. It cost hundreds of thousands of human lives before the marshy islands at the mouth of the Neva could be rendered fit to receive a million inhabitants and be brought into connexion with the remainder of Russia ; and very many more are annually sacrificed for the maintenance of this capital on its unhealthy site, under the 60th parallel, hundreds of miles distant from the centres of Russian life. The development of the railway system and the rapid coloniza- tion of southern Russia now operate, however, adversely to St Petersburg. Its foreign trade is not actually decreasing, but the very rapid growth in the exports of Russia within the twenty years before 1886 was entirely to the benefit of other ports more highly favoured by nature, such as Riga and especially Libau, while the rapid increase of population in the Black Sea region is tending to shift the Russian centre of gravity : new centres of commercial, industrial, and intellectual life are being developed at Odessa and Rostoff. The revival of Little Russia is another influence operating in the same direction. Another important factor in the growth of the influence of St Petersburg on Russian life was the concentration of all political power in the hands of an absolute Government and in the narrow circles surrounding the chief of the state. As Yuriy Dolgorukiy felt the necessity of creating for a new phase of national history that of a centralized state a new capital, Moscow, free from the municipal and republican traditions of the old Russian towns, so Peter I. felt the necessity of again creating a fresh capital for a third phase of the country's progress, a capital where the rising imperial power would be free from the control of the old boyar families. St Petersburg fully answers to this need. For more than a century and a half it was the real centre of political life and of political thought, impregnated with the conception of a powerful central Government. In so strongly centralized a state as Russia was, and still is, and for the phase of life which the empire has passed through during the last two centuries, it mattered little whether the capital was some hundred miles away from the natural centres of life and without the support of a dense and active sur- rounding population. Bureaucracy, its leading feature, was simply reinforced by the remoteness of the capital. But these circumstances are at present undergoing a change. Since the abolition of serfdom and in consequence of the impulse given to Russian thought by this reform, the provinces are coming more and more to dispute the right of St Petersburg to guide the political life of the country. It has been often said that St Petersburg is the head of Russia and Moscow its heart. The first part at least of this saying is true. In the development of thought and in naturalizing in Russia the results of west European reflection St Petersburg has played through- out the present century a prominent part. Attracting to itself from the provinces the best intellects of the country, it has powerfully contributed towards familiarizing the reading public with the teachings of west European science and philosophy, and towards giving to Russian literature that liberality of mind and freedom from the trammels of tradition that have so often been noticed by west Europeans. St Petersburg has no traditions, no history beyond that of the palace conspiracies, and nothing in its past can attract the writer or the thinker. But, as new centres of intellectual movement and new currents of thought develop again at Moscow and Kieff or arise anew at Odessa and in the eastern provinces, these places claim the right to their own share in the further de- velopment of intellectual life in Russia ; and it would not be sur- prising if the administrative and intellectual centre of the empire, after its migrations successively from Kieff, Novgorod, and Pskoff to Moscow, and thence to St Petersburg, were again to follow a new movement towards the south. (P. A. K.) ST PIERRE. See REUNION, vol. xx. p. 493. ST PIERRE. See MARTINIQUE, vol. xv. p. 586. SAINT-PIERRE, CHARLES IRENEE CASTEL, ABBE DE (1658-1743), a French writer of much ingenuity and influ- ence, who is not unfrequently confounded with the author of Paul et Virginie, was born near Barfleur on the 18th of February 1658. His father was bailli of the Cotentin, and Saint-Pierre, who was educated by the Jesuits, appears to have had an easy entrance to the best literary and political society of the capital. He was presented to the abbacy of Tours, which a century before the poet Des- portes had held, and was elected to the Academy in 1695. But in 1718, in consequence of the political offence given by his Polysynodie, he suffered the very rare penalty of expulsion from that body. He died at Paris in 1743. Saint- Pierre's works (collected shortly before his death in eighteen volumes and originally published chiefly in the second and third decades of the 18th century) are almost entirely occupied with an acute and inventive, though generally visionary, criticism of politics, law, and social institutions. They had a great influence on Rousseau, who has left elaborate examinations of some of them, and has repro- duced not a few of their ideas in his own work. The titles are almost sufficient to show their nature. The chief are Projet de Paix Perpetuelle (appositely published at Utrecht in 1713) and Poly- synodie (a severe stricture on the Government of Louis XIV., with projects for the administration of France by a system of councils for each department of government), together with a crowd of memorials and projects for stopping duelling, for equalizing taxa- tion, for treating mendicancy, for reforming education and spelling, &c. Unlike the later reforming abbes of the philosophe period, Saint -Pierre was a man of very unworldly character and quite destitute of the Frondeur spirit. He was also a man of not a little intellectual power, and, as in the case of every such man who gives his fancy free course in the construction of political Utopias, not a few of his wishes and ideas have been realized in course of time. But it is difficult to give him much credit for practical grasp of politics. SAINT-PIERRE, JACQUES HENRI BERNARDIN DE (1737- 1814), French man-of -letters, was born at Havre on 19th January 1737 and was educated at Caen. After a fashion commoner with English than with French boys, he took an early fancy to the sea, and his uncle, a ship captain, gave him the opportunity of gratifying it. But a single voyage to Martinique was enough for him and he went back to school. He next wanted to be a missionary ; but his parents, who had probably taken the measure of his enthusiasms from his sea experiences, objected, and he became an engineer. He served in the army, but was dismissed for insubordination, and, after quarrelling with his family, was in some difficulty. But in 1761 he obtained an appointment at Malta, which also he did not hold long. The most rolling of stones, he appears at St Petersburg, at Warsaw, at Dresden, at Berlin, holding brief commis- sions as an engineer and rejoicing in romantic adventures. But he came back to Paris at the age of thirty even poorer than he set out. He then passed two years in literary work, supporting himself in an unknown fashion, and in 1768 (for he seems to have been as successful in obtaining appointments as in losing them) he set out for the Isle of France (Mauritius) with a Government commission and remained there three years, returning home in 1 77 1 . These wanderings supplied Bernardin with the whole of what may be called his stock-in-trade, for, though he lived more than forty years longer, he never again quitted France. He was very poor, and indeed it is not easy to discover from his biographers what he lived upon, for, though he was an unwearied solicitor of employments and "gratifications," he received but little, and his touchy and sensitive tempera- ment frequently caused him to quarrel with what little he did receive. On his return from Mauritius he was intro- duced to the society of D'Alembert and his friends, and continued to frequent it. But he took no great pleasure in the company of any literary man except Rousseau, of whom in Jean Jacques's last years he saw much, and on whom he formed both his own character and still more his style to a considerable degree. His first work of any im- portance, the Voyage a I' lie de France, appeared in 1773 and gained him some reputation. It is the soberest and therefore the least characteristic of his books. The fitudes de la Nature, which made his fame and assured him of literary success, did not appear till ten years later, his masterpiece Paul et Virginie not till 1787, and his other masterpiece (which, as much less sentimental and showing not a little humour, some persons may be allowed to prefer), the Chaumiere Indienne, not till 1 790. In 1 792 he married
