As the positive and negative poles of an electric battery, or as like and unlike attract, there has long been a strong friendship between Russia and our country. The two represent the antipodes of government. From the period of the appenages (small, petty States, 1054-1238) the enmity has been in a state of smothered or open revolt. It was overrun by the fierce Mongols and held under their iron yoke from 1238 to 1462. During that period Moscow and many other cities were burned and the country devastated. Ivan III. (1263), during his reign of 43 years, did much to consolidate the empire, and introduced the knout as an agent of civilization. Ivan IV., known as Ivan the Terrible, was a ferocious monster (1533-1584), who first assumed the title of Czar (a Slavonic form of the Latin Cæsar), committed numerous atrocities, and killed his eldest son by a blow in a fit of anger. Peter the Great (1689-1725) was remorseless in his punishment of those who revolted, as in the case of the streltzi; the rebellion of the Cossacks of the Don; that of Mazeppa, the hetman of the Little-Russian Cossacks; he inaugurated serfdom, and tortured his own son, Alexis, to death. The rule of Paul was intolerable; he was won over by the artful diplomacy of Napoleon, and assassinated in March, 1801. In the Polish insurrection of 1831 the people were ground to powder. Alexander II. (1855-1881) emancipated the serfs in 1861. It was freedom only in name. Nihilism sprang up and flourished frightfully. Where his father daily walked unattended, Alexander was in hourly peril. April 16, 1866, he was shot at by a Pole; the following year another Pole shot at him while visiting Napoleon at Paris; April 14, 1879, another Pole attempted to kill him. The same year saw the first attempt to blow up the United Palace and to wreck the train upon which the Czar was riding from Moscow to St. Petersburg. A similar conspiracy was successful, March 13, 1881. Five of the conspirators, including a woman, were executed. Alexander ruled twenty-six years, and left Russia exhausted by wars and honeycombed by plots. He was succeeded by the present Alexander, whose reign has been characterized by conspiracies and the constant depredations of suspected persons. The mines of Siberia have been the living death of hundreds of thousands of patriots. More than 50,000 Poles were transported thither after the insurrection of 1863. Since the opening of the present century more than 600,000 men, women, and children have been sent to Siberia. All are in the depths of utter misery and despair. Out of 200,000, more than one-third have disappeared without being accounted for. From 20,000 to 40,000 are living the life of _brodyaghi_--that is, trying to make their way through the forests to their native provinces in Russia.