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elected but appointed by the war ministry. Togetherthey formed a governing oligarchy and the old assemblyof the 'host' counted for little. The privileges andmore especially the duties of the Cossacks became moreclosely defined: they figured regularly in the Russiancampaigns of the eighteenth century and began to beused as an internal police force. Agriculture had spreadnow that there was a plentiful supply of non-Cossacklabour. By the end of the century the officer class hadbecome large landowners and they succeeded in securingadmission into the ' estate' of the gentry, with theconsequent legal right to own serfs. The frontier bynow had moved south to the Kuban and the NorthCaucasus steppes. 1For the next hundred years the Don Territory formed"a province governed by special institutions,'' but inlaw and administration more and more assimilated tothe rest of Russia. It grew greatly in population andwealth. By 1914 the Don Cossacks supplied nearly150,000 cavalrymen, but as a whole they formed bythen well under half the total population of about4,000,000, though they owned three-fifths of the land.Divided amongst themselves, they stood over againstthe great mass of incomers, ex-serfs, independentfarmers, labourers, and coal-miners. Rostov, foundedin 1761, which was non-Cossack, had grown to be a cityof over a hundred thousand and the greatest centre ofthe south-east.Thus two centuries of colonization had transformedthe frontier and radically changed the structure ofCossack society. The Cossacks had always differentiatedsharply between themselves and Russians: while continuingto cherish the forms of their traditional customsand privileges, they developed a new tradition of loyaltyto the tsar, not only as against his enemies abroad, butas well against his enemies at home. The watchwordsof one of their songs in the 1905 Revolution summed up1 Life on this frontier a generation later is brilliantly illustrated inparts of Lermontov's classic A Hero of Our Times (1840) and graphicallydescribed in Tolstoy's equally autobiographical novel of the Terek lineThe Cossacks (1862) (various translations of both, including the World'sClassics series).52