There are, however, two principal types, almost two peoples, speaking two dialects and wholly separated from each other: the Great Russians and the Little Russians. In their qualities and in their defects they represent in Russia the eternal contrast of north and south. Their history is no less diversified than their nature; the first have their centre at Moscow, the second at Kiev. Stretching, the one to the northeast, the other to the southwest, these two unequal halves of the nation do not precisely correspond to the two great physical zones of Russia. This is due partly to nature, partly to history, which has hindered the development of the one and fostered that of the other. The southern steppes, open to every invasion, long arrested the expansion of the Little Russians, who for centuries were shut up in the basins of the Dnieper, the Bug, and the Dniester; while the Great Russians spread freely in the north and east and established themselves in the enormous basin of the Volga; masters of nearly all the forest regions and of the great Ural Lake, they took possession of the Black Belt and the steppes along the Volga and the Don. The White Russian inhabits Mohilev, Vitebsk, Grodno, Minsk--a region possessing some of the finest forests in Russia, but whose soil is marshy and unwholesome. United politically with the Little Russian, the two have been classed under the name Western Russians. Subjected at an early date by Lithuania, whose dialect became its official language, White Russia was with the greater part of Little Russia united to Poland, and was for centuries the object of strife between that nation and the Muscovite czars, from the effects of which strife she still bleeds. Of the three Russian tribes this is perhaps the purest in blood; but thanks to the sterility of the soil and the remoteness of the sea, she has remained the poorest and least advanced in civilisation. The Great Russians are the most vigorous and expansive element of the Russian nation, albeit the most mixed. Finnish blood has left its traces in their physique; Tatar dominion in their character. Before the advent of the Romanovs they formed alone the Muscovite Empire, and their czars took the title “Sovereign of all the Russias” long before Alexis, father of Peter the Great, justified this title by the annexation of the Ukraine. Hence Great Russia, under the name Muscovite, has been considered by certain foreigners the true, the only Russia. This is an error; since the Great Russian, the product of the colonisation of central Russia by the western Russians before the invasion of the Tatars antidates the state and even the village of Moscow. If, therefrom has emerged the Muscovite autocracy, it is impossible to cut the ties that bind it to the great Slav republic of the world whose name is still the active symbol of liberty--Novgorod.