bert Gallatin and James A, Bayard to 

 act in conjunction with John Ouincy 

 Adams in the negotiations; but the Sen- 

 ate refused to confirm the nomination of 

 Gallatin on the ground that he still held 

 the Secretaryship of the Treasury, and so 

 the peace proposals fell to the ground 

 and the war was fought out. When 

 Alexander II freed the serfs of Russia 

 the United States Congress passed a com- 

 plimentary resolution and sent it to St. . 

 Petersburg by a special envoy. The in- 

 cident pleased the Tsar greatly, and a 

 little later he returned the compliment 

 with interest. His minister to Washing- 

 ton, intimate friend of Slidell and Ben- 

 jamin, did all that he could to prevent 

 secession, but after Fort Sumter was 

 fired on Russia came out for the Union. 

 In 1863 the English Government had 

 become seriously stirred as a result of 

 the war. What happened to our trade 

 when the present war broke out was 

 small in comparison with what our 

 civil war did for Great Britain. Hun- 

 dreds of thousands of people in the 

 textile mills were thrown out of work 

 because American cotton was not to be 

 had. Intervention was openly discussed. 

 Gladstone had hailed Jefferson Davis as 

 a man who had made a nation, and even 

 Lord Palmerston was inclined to lend ear 

 to suggestions of forcing a peace in some 

 way. Finally the English government 

 sounded France with reference to a sort 

 of enforced mediation. About this time, 

 however, a Russian fleet made an osten- 

 tatious visit to the port of New York 

 and the social functions that accompanied 

 the visit put England on notice as to 

 where Russia stood, and England's 

 interest in stopping the war suddenly 

 ceased. 



i^iNAL impre;ssions 



' There are conditions in Russia which 

 a visitor from the land of free schools, 

 free speech, and a free press finds it 

 dif^cult to understand; the deplorable 

 rarity of good schools, making it a sore 

 trial for a poor man to get his son edu- 

 cated; the arrival of his American news- 

 paper, with often half a page stamped 



out by the censor in ink so black that it 

 is impossible to decipher a single letter; 

 the timidity, nay fear, of some people of 1 

 being overheard when talking frankly on I 

 political subjects; the enormous power 

 concentrated in the hands of one indi- 

 vidual. But other writers have written 

 with needless emphasis and length on 

 these unpleasant themes, and it is not nec- 

 essary to discuss them here. 



The purpose of this article has been to 

 set forth the immensity of the great land 

 empire, in size four times larger than the 

 Roman Empire at its greatest ; to visual- 

 ize some of the common sights and cus- 

 toms among a kindly and noble race by 

 the use of many unposed photographs ; 

 to show the tremendous vitality and fe- 

 cundity of the Russian people, more than 

 half of whom lived in bondage in the 

 lifetime of thousands of our readers ; and 

 to explain the youth of Russia as a na- 

 tion, showing how she threw off her for- 

 eign yoke in the same quarter century 

 that Jamestown was founded and the 

 Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, and 

 how she is in some respects younger even 

 than the United States, for our ancestors 

 brought from England and Holland in- 

 stitutions wrought through centuries of 

 hard testing, and a blood and brain 

 trained for self - government through 

 many, many generations. 



But with all the ignorance and poverty 

 of the masses in Russia in the past, the 

 leaven of national intelligence has begun 

 to work. The government is following 

 the example of our own country in try- 

 ing to take the gospel of good farming 

 to the peasantry, showing the peasant 

 how to make wholesome butter and more 

 per cow ; showing him how to grow more 

 bushels of wheat and rye and oats to the 

 acre; bringing him better blood for his 

 horses and his cattle and his sheep. The 

 progress of the times has also brought 

 the moving picture and the telephone 

 and the railroad into a thousand remote 

 communities, and has set to work forces 

 that inevitably will spell the doom of 

 illiteracy and ignorance and make Russia 

 in fact the land of unlimited possibilities. 



HENRY GANNETT, 



The Loved and Honored President of the National Geographic 

 Society, Died at His Home in Washington, November 5, 1914. An 

 appreciation of his life will appear in an early number of the 

 National Geographic Magazine. 



