You probably know that Russia is not only equal in extent to half Europe, but stretches right across the northern part of the continent of Asia to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. This vast empire actually covers one-seventh of all the land on the globe. Unlike the British Empire, it is continuous; you may travel from one end of it to the other by rail. You will get some idea of the tremendous railway journey involved when I tell you that the distance from the old city of Warsaw on the river Vistula to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan is about 6,200 miles--that is, about two-fifths of the circumference of the world at the latitude of London. Naturally you will expect this vast empire to be inhabited by vast numbers of people. In the year 1912 it was estimated that there were more than 171 millions of people under the sway of the Tsar--that is, more than one in ten of all the people on earth. I have already told you of the extraordinary variety of races which dwell beneath the Union Jack; there is almost as great a variety of peoples in the Russian Empire. There are, for example, thirty different races in the Caucasus alone. The bulk of the inhabitants, however, are of Slav race, and are descended from a people who, ages ago, entered Europe from Asia, and gradually conquered the land and settled in it. What are known as the Great Russians form the strongest and toughest race in the whole empire. They are Slavs who in early times intermingled with the Finns and set up the kingdom of Moscow. These Great Russians gradually succeeded in enlarging their borders, until their territory stretched to the Crimea and Turkestan on the south and south-east, to Manchuria in the far east, and to Germany in the west. The Great Russians are now the largest and most important of all the Russian peoples, and they occupy the bulk of the country. The descendants of the races and tribes which the Great Russians subdued still exist, and they differ as widely from their conquerors as a northern Frenchman differs from a southern Frenchman. One of these conquered races consists of the White Russians, who represent some of the earliest Slav colonists, and live near the sources of the Niemen, the Dwina, and the Dnieper in the south-west of the country. Most of the people of the south, however, are Little Russians. They speak a dialect of their own, love dance and song, and are less fond of work than the peoples of Northern Russia.