Apprenticed to Mars at birth, as were the Spartans before them, the Cossacks, survivals from a young, non-industrial world, are the most picturesque fighters on Europe’s battlefields. A frontier’s folk like the people of our early West, a mixture of many adventurous elements, and constituting within their own country a class more distinctive than that of the American cowboy, they have finally been subdued to the needs of the great imperial government of Petrograd, taken over just as they were into its machinery, and preserved as a soldier caste. A wild, conquering, freebooting folk, the Cossacks have been brought within the fold of Russian civilization as soldiers, descendants of warriors and progenitors of generations of soldiers to meet the future needs of the Slav empire. These Cossacks, in the leisure of national peace, conquered the vast empire of Siberia for Russia, and in each Russian war for the last hundred years have formed the czar’s irresistible first-line strength. The Cossacks are a people of the limitless steppes, a people of close corporation, situated in Russia as a race apart, a soldier caste, their state a military organization, their connection with the great empire maintained through the imperial war department, the administration of their internal affairs practically in their own hands, and their privileges as a caste almost as pronounced as were those of the Spartan soldier-citizen, or more comparable to the solider caste of the older Indian organization. The Cossacks came of the original Slav stock, but they were those Slavs who never bowed their heads beneath a yoke, foreign or domestic; who lived a free life on the borders of their race’s civilization, wandering, fighting, buccaneer Slav tribes, who penetrated deeply into Tartar and Georgian lands, who lived by the hunt and by plunder, and who maintained themselves on the borders of Asia and Europe free of all serfdom. These sturdy Russian wanderers assimilated many adventurous elements, took up among them many Tartars and Slavs, and so to-day the Cossack type is a more or less distinct one. The total Cossack population of Russia is more than 3,000,000. Some years ago they owned nearly 146,500,000 acres of land, of which 105,000,000 acres was arable and 9,400,000 forest land. This land is held by the Cossacks in community partition as a state reward for their military service. It will be seen that the Cossack holdings amount to about fifty acres for each man, woman, and child of the people. There is an admiring, half-envious Russian catchword about being as “free and as rich as a Cossack.”