supported the power of the Grand Dukes and of the priesthood; and the despotism of the Golden Tribe, much as it circumscribed further improvement, strengthened the oppressed in their faith in their religion, fidelity to their rulers, and love to their mutual fatherland. These are still the characteristics of the people; and when one reflects that the embryo of this nation, the Great Russians--thirty-six million people of one root, one faith, and one language--forms the greatest homogeneous mass of people in the world, no one will doubt that Russia has a great future before her. It has been said that with an increase of population this boundless empire must fall to pieces. But no part of it can exist without the other--the woody North without the fertile South, the industrial centre without both, the interior without the coast, nor without the common joint stream, navigable for four hundred miles--the Volga. But, more than all this, the national spirit unites the most distant portions. Moscow is now the national centre not only of the European Empire, but of the ancient and holy kingdom of the Czars, from which the historical reminiscences of the people spring, which, perhaps, is big with the destinies of the future empire in spite of a deviation of two centuries. The foreign civilization which was forced upon them has never penetrated the mass of the people. The national peculiarity has remained complete in language, manners, and customs, in a highly remarkable municipal constitution, the freest and most independent existing anywhere; and, finally, in their architecture. The last can, of course, only be applied to the churches. In Russia nearly everything is new. What is older than a hundred years is looked upon as an antiquity. The Russian dwelling-house is of wood, and therefore never reaches that age, unless, like the one of Peter the Great, it be encased by a stone one. Even the palaces of the Emperor are new, and only here in Moscow can be found a ruin of the old Dworez of the Czars. There are churches in existence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (a great age for Russia), and the strictly conservative spirit of the priesthood has been instrumental in retaining the same style of architecture in the later buildings.