The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

200 RUSSIA IN EUROPE.shed on behalf of " our Slav brethren ! " For the changes of political geographyarc not yet made by the free will of peoples, and to shift frontier-lines states stillintervene with their fleets and armies.On the other hand, most of the Russian " Panslavists " have hitherto dreamedof this union of the Slav populations in no spirit of freedom or absolute equality.Most of them would transfer the hegemony to " Holy Russia," as representedby the Muscovite nationality, its Government, and its Church. But how is sucha union to be effected without imposing chains upon the weak, and laying theseeds of future revolutions ? For in Russia, even more than in other states, itbehoves us carefully to distinguish between the nation and its rulers. Rus.-iuis at once a modern people seeking in agriculture and industry the conquest ofhalf a continent, and an effete empire seeking embalmment in the cerements ofMongolian and Byzantine traditions. " A new and an old land," says a writerin the Revue des Dcu.r-Mondcs, " an Asiatic monarchy and a European colony ; atwo-headed Janus, western in its young, eastern in its old features."But whatever internal changes may be anticijxited in the vast Russian world,the Slavs are destined by their very geographical situation soon to play a chief partin historv- To her central position in Europe Germany is largely indebted forher present importance. But has not Russia an analogous, and strategically asafer, position in the centre of the Old World ? Is she not the natural mediumof communication between "Western Europe and China, between those two groupsof populations which so resemble each other in their slow evolution, and whichyet present so many striking contrasts ? Lastly, does not Russia, pre-eminentlythe continental power, everywhere come face to face with the great maritimepower in her onward march from Constantinople to Tien-tsin ? Through herfleets, her military strongholds, her trading stations and colonies, Englandembraces all the eastern hemisphere, encompassing it round the African continentfrom Ireland to Singapore and the China seas. And if she lacks theadvantage of forming, like Russia, a geographical whole, and possessing in hervast empire some solid nucleus of population as a rallying-poiut for her outlyingdependencies, she husbands at least sufficient wealth, industry, vital force, andperseverance, and she has a sufficient hold on her subject races to maintain herground on an equal footing with Russia in all struggles for influence or in openwarfare. Between the two empires, whose " scientific frontiers " must soonmeet, the shock seems inevitable. The fate of the world may soon be decidedat the foot of the Central Asiatic highlands, in those regions to which popularlore refers the birth of mankind, and where the Aryan peoples seek the cradle oftheir race.