CHAPTER XV.

THERE SHOULD BE AN AMERICAN OPINION OF RUSSIA.

Although Russia has become the most powerful nation. of Europe, she remains in great degree unknown. Her advance upon Europe and the East has been as steady, as resistless, as mysterious, as the descent of a glacier from the Alps. All the force of earth can neither turn the glacier backward, nor divert it from its course, nor even arrest its progress; nor can science fully explain the force that pushes forward the enormous mass. There remains, however, the fact, that year by year it encroaches more and more upon the valley below. Each summer melts off a little of its solid front, but still the icy boundary of to-day is beyond the line on which it rested a year ago.

So with Russia. Her colossal proportions are expanding still, her frontier line is moving on, plowing its way like the edge of the glacier through all obstacles, and though we hear continually of losses she incurs, and of defeats which she suffers, we find that notwithstanding all, she has been moving on, and has established herself in new possessions, at the very moment when the rest of Europe was rejoicing over her supposed discomfiture. Statesmen, polit

ical economists, even historians, give no adequate explanation of this overshadowing phenomenon, no satisfactory account of the interior life which is thus forcing the nations aside to make room for the growth of Russia. Europe sneers at the horde of northern barbarians, but then she saw the best appointed army and the ablest commander of modern times utterly crushed by them, and hurled in broken fragments over their frontier, and this, too, when up to the startling result, it was declared that Russia was beaten in every battle, that her capital was taken, and the Empire was ruined. At the commencement of the Crimean war, we were informed that Russia was exhausted by her disasters in the Caucasus, that a small tribe there was sufficient to hold her power at bay, that she had no money wherewith to prosecute a war, that her army was formidable only on paper, scattered through her vast territory in disconnected detachments, incapable of combined action; and many believed and asserted that Turkey alone was an overmatch for her foe; and yet a formidable English fleet spent two summers in the Baltic without daring to look upon Cronstadt, and the most formidable armament that the world perhaps ever saw, spent its force and exhausted its skill for two years in vain upon a single Russian outpost. England and France met not the unwieldy, stupid, almost helpless giant which they have loved to describe and call Russia, but the living power of a great nation, whose power has been wielded with a skill and energy at least equal to to their own.

Russia has made no great and sudden conquests in Europe; she has poured no living deluge abroad for the desolation of the world-a tide whose ebb follows quickly after the swell of the flood; but she is the more formidable for that very reason. She grows. Her progress follows the law of a life, and its development is after the model of a national idea. Herein lies her strength; and the power of this life, yet young and vigorous, will carry her far into the future.

Until recently, the Empire of the Czars has awakened

very little attention or sympathy in the American mind. Its remote position, and the channels through which we have obtained our scanty information, have prevented us from forming any correct and well-defined idea of its prospects, resources and policy. Most Americans have been led to think of Russia as a land of almost perpetual snow and frost, of interminable forests, or uninhabitable plains, and few perhaps have asked themselves, how in such frozen wastes and forest solitudes, seventy millions of people have not only contrived to exist, but have grown up into the most formidable nation of Europe. Again, thousands regard her as an assemblage of boisterous hordes, having no common life or bond, held together by the power of a military despotism, and ruled over by a half-savage tyrant. Few have been led to inquire how, upon such a supposition, we are to account for her rapid and steady advance to the foremost position of the eastern world. It would not be easy for a semi-barbarous people, with merely a military tyrant at their head, to reach so eminent a station by the very side of the civilization of western Europe, and in competition with such powers as England, France, and Austria. The national policy of Russia has been represented to Europe and America under the single idea of a perpetual longing to rush on Turkey, and seize upon Constantinople. Nearly all else has been vailed from view. The true character of this policy and its real objects have been but partially understood. Russia has, moreover, been viewed with dislike or indifference by Americans, because of the form of her government, and her supposed hatred of a liberal and repub lican policy. She has been regarded as the determined foe of the rights of man; as neither desiring for herself, nor willing to admit in others, any other form of civilization than such as may be produced by an absolute military despotism. It has been supposed that Russia and America are the true opposites and even antagonists of each other, the one representing a half-civilized oriental despotism, the other rational republicanism. The thought once scarce entered the American mind that a mutual regard might

spring up between the two Powers, and that they may yet become the friendly representatives of the two leading ideas of the world.

It is quite evident that the popular opinion of the great Northern Power, does not correspond either with her past history or her present position. Her power and resources. have been underrated even in Europe. France and England have miscalculated the strength of their antagonist. Europe has misjudged her, because the sources of her vitality are but imperfectly known. Yet it is manifest that she has interior springs, whose copious flow supplies a broad and steady stream of national life. Russia presents every external sign of a living organism—not merely an aggregation of tribes, of fragments bound into a mass by present circumstances, which in any important change may fall asunder. The resistance which, in 1812, she offered to western Europe, was that of an organized body, animated by a national life. There was a national heart beating with hot enthusiasm in the midst of her snows; there was a national feeling smarting under a national wound; there was unyielding resolution-ready to sacrifice all things for the preservation of their country, determined to make of that country a desert, if the invader could not be otherwise expelled; and it was the result of a living force that at last swept her foes away. It was not a subdued or dispirited people, not a people fired with no love of country, that pressed upon and bore down the retreating forces of Bonaparte. Since that period there has been a steady enlargement and increase of vigor, as by growth from a strong central life.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL POWER.

In this age of the world, when civilization, instead of being confined to a single luminous point, is diffused over so large a portion of the world's surface, and a universal empire is no longer possible, there are certain conditions without which no great nation can come into existencecertain elements of strength necessary to procure for a people the first rank among the Powers of earth. The first of these conditions is an extensive territory. In the midst of the powerful kingdoms of modern times, no petty state, with limited domain, could exercise any important sway. Greece, placed on her ancient territorial footing, and pos sessed again of her former resources, would now be but a "little one" among the nations. Egypt could not now sway the world's sceptre from the valley of the Nile, nor could old Chaldea be in this age the "Lady of Kingdoms." Even if Rome should arise once more, possessed of all her Italian and Eastern power, leaving Russia, France, England, and the German states, as they now are, she would no longer be the mistress of the world. To hold rank among the present "great Powers" of Europe, a territory is required, capable of sustaining a population of at least