The soldiers and statesmen who carried Russia’s power across a savage continent had sought out many inventions. But by whatever means each successive territory was won, its maintenance had been by the warrant that the Slavs had gone not lightly, adventuring to conquest, but as an earnest host clearing a way for the homes and the hearths of their race. The colonist had followed the Cossack; cities and villages, railways and telegraphs, had risen behind the armies. The dawn of the twentieth century saw a mighty expanse of Siberia redeemed from a desolate waste to a land of farms and villages, of mines and industries; a native population, once hardly superior to the American Indian, not, like him, displaced and exterminated, but raised side by side with the settlers to a more equitable place than is held by any other subject people in Asia. The Russian advance had brought the establishment of the volunteer fleet plying from far Odessa to Vladivostok, and the completion of the greatest railway enterprise the world has ever seen. It had opened from Europe to the Far East a land-route more important to more people than the water-route discovered by Vasco da Gama. The fruition of a nation’s hope was lost when the Eagles went down at Port Arthur. For those who feast at Russia’s cost the reckoning is long. Predecessors not unfamed are worthy of remembrance: the Tatars who lorded it four hundred years, the Poles whose kings caroused in the Kremlin, the great Emperor, with his Grande Armée, whose stabled horses scarred the walls of St. Basil, the Turks, the Swedes,--all conquerors of yesterday. But long years must take their toll of life and gold before Russia can carry the entrenched lines along the Yalu, and reënter the redoubts hewn in the sterile hills around Port Arthur. The spoils to the victors for the present are unchallenged. The Russian way to China is not now through Manchuria. But the ancient road of the Kiahta caravans is still unblocked. Here is the shortest route from Europe to the East. Here, through the defiles and the broken foothills of the Gobi Plateau, lies the future redemption of the great unfettered land-route to North China. The Chinese are themselves advancing to anticipate it. They have already built into Kalgan. To this trading-centre across the pale, a Russian railway may yet pass and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled wilds of Mongolia. In the cycles of progress old paths are reworn. Pharaoh’s canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was swallowed up under the sands of three thousand years when the Genoans won a way across the Isthmus. Their track was left unsought when the Portuguese showed the route for ships around the Cape. Yet to-day the Strait of Suez is thronged with reborn commerce.