Properly speaking, there are no social classes in Russia, a phenomenon which explains to some extent the political life and internal constitution; there is no co-ordinate proportion between the rural and the urban element, and at first sight one sees in this vast empire only the innumerable mass of peasants, just as on the map one sees only a wide and monotonous plain. Although it is true that a rural and commercial aristocracy did arise and flourish in old Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the era of invasions, yet the passions of the wars that followed gave it the death-blow. The middle classes in the rich and independent republics lost their wealth and influence, and the people, being unable of themselves to reorganize the State, sustained the princes, who soon became autocrats, ready at the first chance to subdue the nobles and unite the disintegrated and war-worn nation. With the sub-division into independent principalities and the institution of democratic municipalities the importance of the cities decreased, and the privileged classes were at an end. The middle class is the least important. In the same districts where formerly it was most powerful it has been dissolved by the continuous infusion of the peasant element, owing to the curious custom of emigration, which is spontaneous with this nomadic and colonizing people. Many farmers, although enrolled in the rural villages, spend a large part of the year in the city, filling some office, and forming a hybrid class between the rural and artisan classes, thus sterilizing the natural instincts of the laboring proletariat by the enervation of city life. The emperors were not blind to the disproportion between the civic and rural elements, and have endeavored to remedy it. The industrial and commercial population fled from the cities to escape the taxes; therefore they promulgated laws prohibiting emigration and the renunciation of civic rights, under severe penalties. Yet with all these the cities have taken but a second place in Russian history. Western annals are full of sieges, defences, and mutinies of cities; in Russia we hear only of the insurrection of wandering tribes or hordes of peasants. Russian cities exist and live only at the mandate or protection of the emperor. Every one knows what extraordinary means were taken by Peter the Great to build St. Petersburg upon the swamps along the Neva; in twenty-three years that remarkable woman called the Semiramis of the North founded no less than two hundred and sixteen cities, determined to create a mesocratic element, to the lack of which she attributed the ignorance and misery of her empire. Whenever we see any rapid advancement in Russia we may be sure it is the work of autocracy, a beneficence of despotism (that word so shocking to our ears). It was despotism which created the modern capital opposite the old Byzantine, legendary, retrogressive town,--the