Great, indeed, is the disenchantment that awaits us at every step, when we seek to discover in the majority of the Russian people those traces of progress, which ought to exist according to the statements of Russian hirelings in the European press. The Englishman who, in 1865, in a pamphlet called "Russia, Central Asia, and British India," sought to indoctrinate the English public with the same idea, and, inferring the commencement of many reforms from the bearing of such innovations as slave emancipation, placed such a conversion in the foreground, though even Russian writers like Herzen and Dolgorukoff are doubtful of it, would in all likelihood have thought very differently, if he had drawn the parallel, not between persons of intelligence, but between the Russian people and the Asiatics. On that immense frontier where Russia touches Asia, we shall everywhere find the Russians standing on a markedly lower level of development, and in freedom of manners far behind those Asiatic peoples to whom we would impart the advantages of our younger European as compared with their old Asiatic civilisation. Alexander Michie, a traveller from Pekin to Petersburg, and so great a friend of Russia that he calls Siberia a second Paradise, and deems the exiled Poles enviably fortunate, cannot, however, help proclaiming aloud the superiority of the Chinese to the Russians, wherever he finds the two holding intercourse with each other. And this is the case not only in Maimadshin and Kiachta, but even among the Mussulmans. The Russian, as a northerner, will display more energy than the Asiatic _de pur sang_; but his remarkably dirty exterior, his drunkenness, his religion bordering on fetishism, his servility, his crass ignorance, his coarse, unpolished manners,--are characteristics which make him show very poorly against the supple, courtly, keen-sighted Eastern. Just as I have heard a cultivated Moslem Tadjik in Bokhara speak with contempt of the uncivilised Russians, whom he set above the Kirghis only, so in all likelihood will every Chinaman, every Persian in Transcaucasia, and every well-educated Tartar in Kazan, say the same. What can these nations, then, learn from Russia? Can her forms of government awaken any envy in Asiatic races? The corruptibility of the placemen, their tyrannical and arbitrary conduct under Nicholas, the mass of more than fifty million peasants who occupied the lowest of all positions beside the caste of placemen and nobles,--all this really is not particularly alluring for those among whom the wildest autocratic institutions are yet combined with patriarchal mildness.