6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and no barriers and as a consequence no separate states over all of this 

 great region. 



The size of the Eussian empire is therefore tremendous. European 

 Eussia is in itself larger than the other nineteen states of the continent 

 taken together, and when we include Asiatic Eussia, western Europe 

 shrinks into insignificance. The Eussian empire comprises one sixth 

 of the total land area of the world ; it is four times the size of the con- 

 tinent of Europe, forty-two times the size of France, nearly three times 

 the size of the United States without Alaska, and seventy times the size 

 of the British Isles. An English sailor knowing little about geography, 

 and not yet caught by the propaganda of the English press in favor of 

 things Eussian once declared the " Eooshan " vf as everywhere. " I met 

 him in the Baltic, then I sailed around the whole of Europe and found 

 him on the Black Sea, and after six months around the Cape to India 

 and China, I met him again on the Pacific." There are one hundred 

 and seventy-five million Eussians, and yet Eussia is the most thinly 

 populated of the great nations. "When you get to my country," said 

 a young Eussian nobleman from Bessarabia to me as we neared Libau 

 on the steamer, " You will see how Eussia is big, very big ! " 



Despite its immense extent, however, the land under the scepter of 

 the Tsar constitutes a geographic unit. Even geologically it possesses a 

 degree of uniformity found nowhere else over so large an area. From 

 the Arctic to the Black Sea and from Poland to the Urals, and even 

 farther Siberia, the strata are horizontal. The last of European land 

 to emerge from the glacial drift, it has not been lifted, broken or forced 

 out of place by the great upheavals which caused the diversified surface 

 of western Europe. 



Even as to its boundaries or frontiers, it is exceptionally clearly de- 

 fined and the political state conforms on nearly all sides to the natural 

 or physical. I say nearly, because towards Austria the Carpathians con- 

 stitute a natural boundary which the Eussian state has not yet reached, 

 and which Petersburg confidently hopes to attain through the present 

 war. Then too there are no geographic limits at two important points. 

 Eeference to the map shows that there is no physical boundary on the 

 middle west where Eussia merges into the German plain. Although 

 nature forgot to form a natural frontier in this region, the ethnic fac- 

 tor entered in and the presence of the Teuton, for the time being at 

 least, staked out a frontier against the Slav. But as usually happens 

 when the ethnic frontier is unsupported by an adequate geographic 

 boundary, confusion and friction arose. Even in times of peace the 

 mothers of East Prussia are wont to silence their children with the 

 ominous warning " Hush, the Eus is coming ! " In Poland the absence 

 of a natural boundary is dramatically reflected in political history, not 

 only in the sad tragedy of the destruction of that kingdom in the eigh- 



