THE one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV., surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. The latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause providing that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue trading freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not want these men who have brought us poison for our bodies and souls; they have sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our Lord and Saviour.” This speech affords a melancholy insight into the intellectual condition of the people over whom Ivan held his terrible sway. Nor can one wonder. Printing had been popular for upwards of a century in the rest of Europe before a press found its way into the Muscovite Empire, where it aroused among the natives no less astonishment and fear than the first sight of a musket did among the inhabitants of Zululand, and was promptly consigned to the flames by the priests, as a Satanic invention. Things did not improve during the succeeding ages. Till the end of the seventeenth century Russia remained almost as total a stranger to the development of the Western world and to its nations as Tibet is at the present day. Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably larger in contemporary imagination than the vast dominions of the White Czar. British traders at rare intervals brought from the port of Archangel, along with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the snow-clad plains and sunless forests of those remote regions, and of their savage inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty, squalor, and superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the even rarer testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of travel spoke of princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving peasants, and of ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind that kind of wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends the narratives of travellers in unknown lands.