For three centuries Russia now, amid many troubles, prepared herself to take a place amongst European Powers. She was still more or less subject to the Asiatic. But she was not Asiatic, and her vast area stood between Europe and Asia and allowed the more Western nations to grow up free from interference from any Eastern people, except in the case of the great invasion of the Turks coming up from the south-east. How great was the service that Russia unconsciously did to civilisation during those centuries! If the Tartar had come with the Turk, or had followed him, the White Races and their civilisation might have been swept away. After being the bulwark of Europe for centuries Russia at last found her strength and became the avenger of the White Races. By the sixteenth century the Russian power had been consolidated under the Muscovite Czars, and a great nation, of which the governing class was altogether European, began to push back the Asiatic. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the Russian Power grew. The natural direction of expansion was southward. The new nation wanted a place in the sun, and looked longingly towards the Mediterranean. Only the Turk stood in the path, and for the Russian Czars war with the Turk had something of a religious attraction. It was the Cross against the Crescent. It was the champion of the Greek Church winning back the Byzantine Empire to Christian domination. For Russia to march south, driving the infidel from Europe, freeing the Greeks, establishing herself in Constantinople, winning warm-water ports and warm-climate fields, seemed to the Russian mind a national policy which served both God and Mammon. That it served God was no slight thing to the Russian people. They, then as now, cherished a simplicity and a strenuousness of faith which may be called "superstitious" or "beautiful and childlike" as the observer may wish, but which is undoubtedly sincere. "There has been only one Christian," wrote Heine. If he had known the Russians he would have qualified the gibe. They have a real faith, and it is an important factor in the making of their national policy which has to be taken into account.