But we do not desire, in this small work, to write a geography of the Ukrainian colonies. All are branches severed from the mother-tree, which, considering the low grade of culture of the settlers, must sooner or later be assimilated by the foreign race. Only the Asiatic colonies [128]have some (though rather slight) prospects of preserving their national individuality into the remote future. The constant addition of new arrivals from the home country, as well as the higher culture of the Ukrainian people as opposed to the Russian masses, will preserve the Ukrainian colonists in Asia from rapid denationalization. What is the total number of Ukrainians, and how many of them live in the compact Ukrainian national territory? The answer to this question is not easy—for the same reasons which do not permit us to draw accurately the boundaries of the Ukrainian country. The political subjugation of the Ukraine on the one hand, and the size of the nation and its territory on the other, cause the ruling governments to falsify the statistics, thus concealing the true state of affairs. To a great extent, also, the ignorance of the organs performing the census bear the blame for the unreliability of the statistics collected in Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainians are either simply registered as members of another (usually the ruling) nationality, or forced, by various means, to deny their inherited nationality. In Hungary entire villages are sometimes set down as Magyar, Slovak or Roumanian, altho their population is wholly, or for the most part, Ukrainian. In the Bukowina, too, a great many Ukrainians are registered as Roumanians. In Galicia, all Roman-Catholic Ukrainians are regularly entered as Poles, altho, as a rule, they have not even a mastery of the Polish language. Nevertheless, the Austro-Hungarian statistics allow the possibility of determining very closely the true condition. The Russian census of 1897, which gives us the sole materials for statistics on a racial basis in the Ukraine, was carried out greatly to the disadvantage of the Ukrainian element. In the cities, only the smallest minority of the Ukrainians are registered [129]as such, all the rest being counted as Russians. The same has been the case in all the Ukrainian colonies and language islands scattered thru the great space of the gigantic Russian Empire. Even so, we are omitting from consideration those Ukrainians who, because of lack of national consciousness or for fear of persecution, have denied their nationality.