206 RUSSIA IN EUROPE. 



shed on behalf of " our Slav brethren ! " For the changes of political geography 

 are not yet made by the free will of peoj)les, and to shift frontier-lines states still 

 intervene with their fleets and armies. 



On the other hand, most of the Russian " Panslavists " have hitherto dreamed 

 of this union of the Slav populations in no spirit of freedom or absolute equality. 

 Most of them would transfer the hegemony to " Holy Russia," as represented 

 by the Muscovite nationality, its Government, and its Church. But how is such 

 a union to be effected without imposing chains upon the weak, and laying the 

 seeds of future revolutions ? For in Russia, even more than in other states, it 

 behoves us carefully to distinguish between the nation and its rulers. Russia 

 is at once a modern people seeking in agriculture and industry the conquest of 

 half a continent, and an effete empire seeking embalmment in the cerements of 

 Mongolian and Byzantine traditions. " A new and an old land," says a writer 

 in the Renie des Deux-Mondes, " an Asiatic monarchy and a European colony ; a 

 two-headed Janus, western in its young, eastern in its old features." 



But whatever internal changes may be anticipated in the vast Russian Avorld, 

 the Slavs are destined by their very geographical situation soon to play a chief part 

 in history. To her central position in Europe Germany is largely indebted for 

 her present importance. But has not Russia an analogous, and strategically a 

 safer, position in the centre of the Old World ? Is she not the natural medium 

 of communication between Western Europe and China, between those two groups 

 of populations which so resemble each other in their slow evolution, and which 

 yet present so many striking contrasts ? Lastly, does not Russia, pre-eminently 

 the continental power, everywhere come face to face with the great maritime 

 power in her onward march from Constantinople to Tien-tsin ? Through her 

 fleets, her military strongholds, her trading stations and colonies, England 

 embraces all the eastern hemisphere, encompassing it round the African con- 

 tinent from Ireland to Singapore and the China seas. And if she lacks the 

 advantage of forming, like Russia, a geographical whole, and possessing in her 

 vast empire some solid nucleus of population as a rallying-point for her outlying 

 dependencies, she husbands at least sufficient wealth, industry, vital force, and 

 perseverance, and she has a sufficient hold on her subject races to maintain her 

 ground on an equal footing with Russia in all struggles for influence or in open 

 warfare. Between the two empires, whose " scientific frontiers " must soon 

 meet, the shock seems inevitable. The fate of the world ma}^ soon be decided 

 at the foot of the Central Asiatic highlands, in those regions to which popular 

 lore refers the birth of mankind, and where the Aryan peoples seek the cradle of 

 their race. 



