This idea of Russian rivalry grew to be an obsession. The melodramas of the British people had for their favourite topic the odious cruelty of Russian tyranny. If a submarine cable to a British colony were interrupted, or a quarry explosion startled the air, the colonists at once turned their thoughts to a Russian invasion, and mobilised their volunteers. Colonists of this generation can remember the thrills of early childhood, when more than once they "prepared for the Russians," and the whole force of some hundreds of volunteers and cadets determined to sell their lives dearly on the battlefield to keep Russian knouts from the backs of their womenfolk, it being seriously considered that the Russian always celebrated a victory by a general knouting. Not until the idea of Russia establishing a hegemony over Europe had been dissipated by the Russo-Japanese War did British statesmanship really discover qualities of good neighbourliness in the Russian. But by that time the main direction of Russian expansion had been definitely settled as eastward instead of southward. Perhaps this was to the ultimate advantage of civilisation, even though the decision left the Hellenic peninsula in the grip of the Turk, for it pushed the buffer territory between Europe and Asia far forward into Asia. Should an Asiatic Power, with revived militancy, ever seek again the conquest of Europe, as Asiatic Powers have done before this, the war must commence in Manchuria, and not on the plains below the Ural Mountains. The position which Russia has occupied as a buffer state between Asia and Europe has kept her back in the ranks of the army of civilisation. Not only has she had to suffer the first of the savage blows which Asian hordes have from time to time aimed at Europe, but also she has had to endure Asiatic additions to her population, reducing the standard of her race. The instinct against race-mixture which Nature has implanted in man is the great safeguard of the work of evolution to a higher type. The White Race, having developed on certain lines to a position which promises, if it does not fulfil, the evolution of a yet higher type, has an instinctive repugnance to mixing its blood with peoples in other stages of evolution. It is this instinct, this transcendental instinct, which is responsible for the objection to miscegenation in the United States, and for the lynchings by which that objection is impressed upon the negro mind. The same instinct is at the back of the "White Australia" laws, forbidding coloured people any right of entry into Australia.