4 
RUSSIA IX EUROPE 
and Kalmucks to live within fixed and permanent boundaries, 
by enrolling tlie Cossacks into bands of cavalry, and substituting 
the agricultural for the nomadic life. Many of the tribes, unwil- 
ling to give up their wandering life, retired beyond the Caspian 
sea, and from those regions continued their inroads upon the 
Russian settlements. Russia, for her own protection, was again 
obliged to subdue these unruly tribes, and thereby to extend 
her dominion still farther to the east, until it finally reached a 
barrier in the Pamir and tlie mountains of Afghanistan. 
PHYSICAL FEATURES OF RUSSIA. 
If nature ever made the boundaries of a nation, it determined 
those of Russia — the Arctic ocean on the north, the Ural 
mountains on the east, the Black and Caspian seas on the 
south, and the Baltic sea on the northwest, with Siberia and 
Trans-Caspia as the natural extension of her empire. 
In August, 1881, I left London on a trip to Russia, passing 
through Antwerp, Berlin, and Konigsberg to St. Petersburg; 
thence to Moscow and Nijni Novgorod. From Moscow I went 
southeast through Russia, over the Caucasus to Tiflis, in Asia; 
thence to Batoum and Sebastopol, on the Black sea, and from 
the Crimea north to ^Moscow. In all this journey of 3,500 miles 
we crossed no range of mountains, we saw no hills more than 
five or six hundred feet in height until we reached the Cau- 
casus. It was one broad, level plain from Antwerp to Konigs- 
berg, 150 miles in width, bounded on the north by the Baltic, 
on the south by the Erzberg and the foothills of the Carpathian 
mountains. Entering Russia, the plain widens, extending north- 
east 1,800 miles along the coast of the Arctic ocean to the Ural 
mountains, south to the Black sea and the foothills of the Cau- 
casus, and southeast 3,000 miles to the mountains of Afghan- 
istan. My letters written from the foothills of the Caucasus say : 
“ Onl}’’ think of traveling from one end of Europe to the other 
over a plain, neither hill nor mountain in all the route, with 
scarcely a new scene from morning to night or from one day 
to another. After two days’ and nights’ traveling nearl}’- due 
south from St. Petersburg we have not reached as far south as 
St. Johns, in Newfoundland.” 
“Yesterday our route was over great plains with rich black 
earth, occasional forests, i)retty well watered; today, broad level 
stej^pes with sandy soil, without a tree in sight. We are trav- 
