14 
RUSSIA IX EUROPE 
and manners of the west. Formerly they used the German lan-» 
guage, then tlie French, taking from France liberal ideas, but now 
Ivussian is the language of the court and has been adopted in 
polite society. The upper classes are as highly cultivated, as 
honorable, and as polished as any of the upper classes in 
Europe. 
The peasantry, recently serfs, in their feelings and habits are 
Asiatics, fliithful to ancient manners and customs. They look 
upon innovation or change with distrust. St. Petersburg is the 
type of the new ideas, IMoscow of the old. 
We now turn to northern and Arctic Russia, a country with 
inhabitants very different from that we have just described. In 
the west is Finland, formerl}" subject to Sweden, but annexed to 
Russia in 1800. The name and origin of the Finns is an ethno- 
logical problem. They are supposed to be of the same race as 
the Hungarian and Bashkirs. In summer the sun’s rays are 
nearly constant, and the growth of vegetation continuous and 
ra})id. 
The people are tall, strongly built, and well proportioned, with 
faces rather square than oval. They are slow, dull, grateful and 
honest, industrious and energetic. Their peculiar language and 
literature have attracted much attention, and although writing 
seems to have been introduced onl}'- al)out three hundi*ed years 
ago and printing about one hundred years later, yet nearly all 
can read and write. 
In the written language phonetic spelling is employed with 
almost perfect consistenc 3 ^ One celebrated linguist says, “ it is 
the most harmonious and sonorous of tongues.” The}’’ are better 
educated, more highly civilized, and are improving more rajndly 
than the Russians. Serfdom was never introduced into Finland, 
and the Finns boast that the}’’ have never had a slave nor a noble 
in all their land. From these causes, while we regard the Rus- 
sians as Asiatics, we must look upon tlie Finns as Europeans. 
Northeast of Finland, on the Arctic circle, and hir to the north 
of it, wliere the shore-line stretches from Archangel toward the 
sunrise fifteen hundred miles, bound in ice chains for eight 
months of the year, where on the cliffs and ledges the snow 
never melts, a wandering tribe, sometimes called Samoyeds, 
live in a desert of ice and snow — a land without a road, with- 
out a field, without a name. Tlieir dwellings are tents l)uilt 
of poles, open at the to]> to let out the smoke, and covered 
