Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic, was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted, well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy. With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border, with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose the autocracy. The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the blaze of her city and her fleet. The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”