Russian landscape. Area and population. Areas and populations of the United Kingdom, Russia, and India com stagnant and brutish as they were five hundred years ago, before their princes had thrown off the Tartar yoke. Let us look into their history a little, and see how it is that whilst most of the world is progressing towards light, Russia is still sunk in medieval darkness, a sort of China in Europe. There is nothing beautiful, nothing joyous, in Russia. As the land is, so are its people-uninteresting, monotonous, undeveloped. Flat immensity, unchanging uniformity, characterise the landscape, whether in the silent forests and frozen morasses of the north, or in the treeless expanses of the rest of that dreary empire. Russia is a vast plain occupying one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe. The population is now about 120 millions. India, with less than a fifth of her rival's area, supports nearly 300 millions.1 1 The following figures, mostly taken from 'The Statesman's YearBook,' 1893, give some details : pared. Allowing for yearly increase, the total population of Russia must now (1894) be about 120 millions, and of India 300 millions. The northern half of Russia is almost uninhabitable from the cold. It is an unreclaimed region of sombre forests, of vast lakes and marshes, icebound for most of the year. Immediately southwards the forests yield dominion to a corn country, the limitless central plains known as the Black Land, which has been from the time of Herodotus downwards a granary for Eastern Europe. Still farther south the Black Land merges into the Steppes, a prairielike pasture region, now largely subdued to the plough. Eastwards of that reclaimed region are barren wastes-unproductive steppes-frequented only by nomads and their scanty cattle. Like the land, so are its rivers-vast, dull, un- Rivers. interesting. Schoolboys are familiar with several: the Dnieper, the Don, the Amoor, and, greatest of all, the Volga, the "Mother Volga" of Russian song. Until the railway partially deposed them, they were the "roads that run" of the country. Being frozen over for from three to six months every year according to latitude, and being navigable in spring and summer, locomotion was by sledge in winter, and by boats when possible. In spring people stayed at home, because the universal thaw and spread of water changed the face of the land into a sea of mud and slush. Of roads, as we know them, there were none and are none. In this respect Russia is not much worse off than the United States, where railroads are splendid but carriage-roads mere tracks. Russia has no stones, a thin population, and a government for the classes No perennially open sea. Mountains. only; hence roads are all simply unmetalled tracks, and untraversable in spring. The rivers sufficed in old days, when the thawed earth forbade the use of sledges. The rivers that in sluggish volume move silently to their seas, find there no emancipation for their freights. Those seas are either icebound, like the Baltic or White Sea, for half the year, or merely lakes like the Caspian, or, like the Black Sea, a quasilake with its narrows sentinelled by other Powers, jealous of Russia's further expansion. At Vladivostok even, on the Pacific, Russia fails to touch a perennially open sea, for there too in winter the bay is frozen over. Vladivostok is many thousands of miles from St Petersburg, and behind it lies Siberia, a great lone land with a population of under one to the square mile. Vladivostok has a future before it when the Siberian railway, now in progress, shall be completed; but that future can never be a potent factor in shaping the destiny of Russia in Europe. As with Russia's seas and rivers, so with her mountains-they are immense, but as yet of no great value to her. Except the Ural range, which separates Russia in Europe from Siberia, all her mountains lie at or near her extremities. None gives birth to a great river. None even influences the climate. The Urals, though the longest mountain system in Europe, run north and south, and their highest peaks range only from 4000 to 5000 feet above sea-level. Being an uninterrupted treeless plain, Russia has Seasons. only two seasons-a long severe winter and a hot summer, with a short interregnum of glorious spring. Like all similar regions—e.g., Central Asia or Australia-Russia suffers from repeated droughts, so much so that famine or scarcity is rarely absent from some tract or tracts as large as Great Britain. The rainfall-much of it in the form of snow-is light and capricious, averaging 14 inches in the east and 22 inches in the west. muzhik. This vast winter-land, with its monotonous mid- The ocean horizon of never-changing flatness, has helped to stamp its inhabitants with its peculiar characteristics—an insurmountable passivity, a melancholy indifference. In India we ascribe the apathetic inertia of the latter-day Muhammadans to the fatalism of their creed; but in Russia it is not so. The muzhik is by courtesy a Christian, but in reality an idolater, a worshipper of icons, a creature of rites and ceremonies. His creed fetters his mind, and tends to keep him the slave of superstition. But it is rather the patriarchal and selfish system of government under which he exists, and the dulness of nature, which make him the listless, shiftless drudge he is. This is true of the muzhik -the Slav peasant of Great Russia-but does not apply to some of the races which make up the 120 million inhabitants of the empire. But the muzhik is the typical Russian. So long as he continues passive, toiling and moiling like the ass or the ox for the good of his master, indifferent to life, in Numbers and dis tribution of Slav and other races. different to death, so long will Russia continue a semi-barbarous Power, great only from her numbers, her vastness, and her invulnerability. Just as in India, so in Russia, the people, the masses, are agriculturists. Dwellers in towns and cities are few; industries are few. At present Russia in Europe has a population of nearly 100 millions, of whom about three-fourths are Slavs. These Slavs are generally divided into Great Russians and cognate tribes, assimilated or Russianised Tartars and Finns (45 millions), with Moscow as their centre; Little Russians, 16 millions, to the south, the inhabitants of rich and productive plains; and White Russians, 5 millions, to the west. These White Russians are the Irish of Russia, though neither so troublesome, so self-assertive, nor so gifted. Their country is unproductive marsh or peat-bog and clay. For centuries they have been abject under the exactions of harsh Polish and Russian landlords, frequently absentees. They are the poorest and most poverty - stricken people of the empire. The Poles, too, to whom may be added Letts and Lithuanians, though Roman Catholics, may be classed as Slavs, and number about 9 millions. Thus there are roundly 75 million Slavs in Russia in Europe, to whom may be added 5 millions more scattered throughout Siberia and Caucasia, and sprinkled over Turkestan and Trans-Caspiana. Besides the so-called Slavs, the empire contains some 40 millions of other races-viz., a million of German colonists, the best peasantry in the empire; over |