Least Slav of all the peoples that pretend to the name, the Great Russian has been the coloniser of the race. His whole history has been one long struggle against Asia; his conquests have contributed to the aggrandisement of Europe. Long the vassal of the Tatar khans, he never forgot under Asiatic domination his European origin; and in the farthest limits of Muscovy the very name Asiatic is an insult to the peasant. Conqueror over Asia, influenced morally and physically by all the populations assimilated or subjugated by him in his march from the Dnieper to the Ural, the Great Russian lost something of his independence, his pride, his individuality; but he gained in stability and solidity. In spite of the obvious evidences of his mixed blood, the Great Russian is in perfect harmony with the Caucasian race by the exterior characteristics which distinguish it--his stature, his complexion, the colour of his hair and eyes. He is apt to be tall, his skin is white, his eyes are very often blue; his hair is usually blond, light chestnut, or red. The long heavy beard so dear to the heart of the moujik and which all the persecutions of Peter the Great failed to induce him to dispense with, is in itself a mark of race, as nothing could be smoother than the chin of the Mongol, the Chinese, or the Japanese. The Little Russians dwelling in the south have brown or dark chestnut hair, and are of purer race, dwelling nearer to the Occident; they pride themselves upon their comparatively unmixed blood, their more temperate climate, their less dreary land; they are a more imaginative, more dreamy, more poetic people than their neighbours of the north. It is in Little Russia that the Zaparogians belong, the most celebrated of those Cossack tribes which in the Ukraine or the southern steppes played so important a rôle between the Poles, the Tatars, and the Turks, and whose name will ever remain in Russia the synonym of freedom and independence. Even to-day the Zaparogian, with his liberal or democratic tradition, remains the more or less conscious and avowed ideal of the majority of the Little Russians. Another reason, in the history of the Ukraine, which makes for democratic instincts in the Little Russians is the foreign origin and denaturalisation of a great part of the higher classes among the Poles and Great Russians. From this double motive the Little Russian is perhaps more susceptible to political aspirations, more accessible to revolutionary seduction than his brother of Great Russia. Of the Cossacks of to-day only those of the Black Sea transplanted to the Kuban between the sea of Azov and the Caucasus are Little Russians; the Cossacks of the Don and the Ural are Great Russians.[b] SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANISATION