A VAST DOMINION. 13 



the second is a palpable defect which never ceases to 

 force itself upon your attention, more especially since 

 the road for nearly the whole of its length is not a 

 road at all, but merely a track across the steppe : and 

 after you have driven close upon 2500 miles by this 

 means, as I did, it is probable that you will be careful 

 not to repeat the experiment, if by any possible means 

 you can avoid doing so. Let it be at once admitted 

 that travelling on Russian post - roads in Asia is a 

 trial to both mind and body. 



Still you must be thankful even for this small mercy, 

 for Russia, unlike our own country, is not small — 

 Siberia alone would comfortably take in the whole 

 of Europe, with a few of its countries thrown in 

 twice over — and there is no danger of your running 

 over the edge in your haste. You may start driving 

 in Russia and go on doing so in a straight line for 

 days, and still find that you are in Russia at the end 

 of them ; so I say, be thankful for these same post-roads 

 in that they make travelling possible. 



And when you have driven day after day towards 

 the rising of the sun, and have at last reached the 

 bounds of the dominions of the Great White Tsar, what 

 lies before you then? Four million square miles of 

 territory, the home of four hundred million souls, whose 

 delight it is to believe that " there is only one sun in 

 the heavens and only one emperor beneath the sky." 

 A nation with a recorded history of close upon four 

 thousand years ; a people that can boast of the oldest 

 civilisation of the world, of an exclusiveness that even 

 now baffles the enterprise of the West, of the distinc- 

 tion of having been responsible for that greatest 

 phantasm of modern times, the Yellow Peril ; an empire, 

 finally, which may yet, by involving the Powers of the 

 twentieth - century civilisation in an Armageddon of 



