Vol. XXVI, No. 5 V/ASHINGTON 



November, 1914 



6 



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YOUNG RUSSIA 



The Land of Unlimited Possibilities 



By Gilbert H. Grosvenor 



RUSSIA is not a State; it is a 

 world. Thus wrote a famous 

 publicist of the land of the Tsar 

 as he contemplated the diversity of ori- 

 gin of its peoples, its wide range of cli- 

 mate, its great variety of resources, and 

 the dissimilarity of aspirations of the 

 human elements of which the empire is 

 composed. 



In the blood of its people is written 

 the impress of the Orient and of the Oc- 

 cident ; of the tropic south and the frigid 

 north; of Confucianism, Mohammedan- 

 ism, and Christianity. Its range of cli- 

 mate gives the Palm Beach touch to its 

 Crimea and the breath of the north to its 

 White Sea region. Its variety of re- 

 sources makes it second only to the 

 TJnited States as the greatest food-pro- 

 ducing country in the world ; places it at 

 the forefront among the nations as to 

 mineral wealth, and gives it a greater 

 limber supply than any other country. 

 Its history borrows from Mongol-land, 

 Lapland, Finland ; from the Black Sea, 

 the Baltic Sea, and the Okhotsk Sea. 

 And its peoples have aspirations varying 

 as widely as those of the Poles and the 

 Mongols, as those of the Confucians and 

 the Jews, as those of the Lapps and the 

 Tatars. 



In area Russia is the greatest compact 

 ■empire on the face of the earth. It is 

 larger than all of North America, larger 

 than the combined area of the United 

 States and Alaska, Canada, Mexico and 



Central America, Cuba, Porto Rico, 

 Haiti, and the other islands of the Carib- 

 bean thrown in, and has a total area of 

 8,505,000 square miles as compared with 

 South America's 6,851,000. The British 

 Empire may be larger, but Britain must 

 girdle the globe to find her people, and 

 traverse the seven seas and the six conti- 

 nents to locate her possessions. Russia 

 is more than twice as big as Europe, and 

 occupies three-fifths of the area of that 

 continent; it is half as big as Asia, and 

 occupies nearly two-fifths of its area. 

 Within its boundaries are embraced two- 

 fifths of all territory of Europe and Asia 

 combined. The Empire holds nearly one 

 and a half times as much land in Asia as 

 China has ; its Asiatic possessions are 

 three times as great as those of Great 

 Britain, and they are forty times as 

 great as those of Japan, even since the 

 new Asiatic balance that followed the 

 Russo-Japanese War was struck. 



RICH IN ALIv RESPECTS BUT ONE 



Indeed, Russia lacks but ten degrees of 

 reaching half way around the earth, and 

 possesses one-sixth of the landed area 

 of the globe. It is divided into more 

 than a hundred provinces — correspond- 

 ing generally to our States — the largest 

 of which is as much bigger than our im- 

 perial State of Texas as the Lone Star 

 State is larger than Virginia. 



But with all its geographic greatness 

 Russia is about as poor in natural outlets 



