It still remains to answer the one further question, why we cannot look with indifference on the danger for English interests from Russian ascendancy, and for what special reason it is that the decline of England's power seems to us so detrimental, that we see in Russia's undue influence a bar to the advance of the spirit of our age. The answer is very simple: Russia was, is, and long will be Asiatic. The cheering prospect that the overgrown body of Russian power will, according to the laws of nature, necessarily break up hereafter into two or more sections, and the danger that threatens us be thereby lessened, is one which we cannot for a moment entertain. We need only fix our eyes on the character of political life in Russia, its social circumstances, the relation of the people towards the upper castes of the governing circle, the general state of popular culture, and the modes of popular thought, to see how everything there is Asiatic, aye, wildly Asiatic in tendency; and how little, in spite of the long struggle after European civilisation, has yet been taken in, to speak comparatively, from what we call European or Western life. Without repeating the well-worn adage, "Scrape a Russian and you will lay bare a Tartar," it is none the less impossible, whether from personal experience, or the reports of later, and to Russia most friendly travellers, to help acknowledging how much may yet be found, on the Neva and in other large Russian towns, of that surface civilisation which many Asiatic governments bring successfully to bear on short-sighted Europe. No doubt this pretence of civilisation succeeds better in Petersburg, wielded by a government containing a strong admixture of Christian and European elements, than in Cairo, Constantinople, and Teheran. The Russian noble, in appearance a finished European, thoroughly versed in our language, manners and modes of thought, will certainly cut a better figure than the semi-European Effendi on the Bosphorus, or the Persian Mirza. A government which draws towards itself, at a cost so heavy, so many scientific and artistic forces, which has lately advanced with so much zeal in founding schools, universities, scientific associations, which hires persons in Europe to blazon forth the progress of Russian civilisation,--can assuredly reap for itself greater credit than the Porte or the Persian ministry, which, engaged in upholding their weakly existence, cannot bestow so much attention on the needful pageantry. No wonder, then, if to a superficial glance Russia seems more European, more imbued with the spirit of our civilisation, and can easily win the sympathy of those who would love her with all their might. But if once we try impartially to lift up the outer covering and peep into the inside of the great Russian community, what shall we behold?