to a large extent mutually hostile. How long would this state of things last? How long would the 55,000,000 of Great Russians submit to such conditions? Is it thinkable that they would do so for a year, for a month, for a day? And if not, what chance would their weaker neighbours have against them? Poland alone contains the elements of a strong and independent State; no one can deny the possibility of Warsaw becoming once more the capital of a kingdom or a republic. But the Polish question is an international one, in regard to which Germany would have a weighty word to say. Little Russia might conceivably establish and maintain a separate existence; we can hardly think it likely. When we come to the remaining nationalities is it conceivable that such comparatively insignificant populations as the Lithuanians, the Letts, the Esthonians, could hold their own against even diminished Russia, and bar her way to the Baltic? The case of Finland is different, for the Finns have proved themselves a progressive and a wise people, and they have a century of autonomy behind them. But even the Finns will need all their wisdom to maintain the position they have lately regained. They can never stand against Russia if it comes to a trial of strength. The Turko-Tartar races, numbering 13,500,000, would, we are told, claim autonomy with the rest, and again we find no fault with fact or argument. But could they, any more than the dwellers on the Baltic, maintain their position against the Muscovite? They ruled Russia for over two centuries, they harried and devastated it for a much longer period. What are their descendants now? In the country, peaceful agriculturists; in the towns, coachmen, dvorniks, waiters, oldclothes men. Once the period of their domination passed, have they shown any aptitude for rule; have they ever displayed the smallest capacity for enlightenment, for progress? The answer is-None! Have they produced a single man of genius, of distinction, even, in literature, in science, in art; in the court or in the field; in peace or in war? Not one! They are excellent people-honest, industrious, peaceable, trustworthy; but they have had their day; they have demonstrated both what they can and what they cannot do; in short, they have found their level. They will never again rule Russia; they will never achieve independence; they will never maintain even autonomy, should they, in some convulsion of the Russian Empire, momentarily grasp it.

Napoleon's gibe is true enough in the figurative sense; but literally applied, as many who ought to know better do apply it, it is just one of those frequent generalisations, the more misleading for the modicum of truth they contain. That there is

Tartar, or rather Touranian, blood in the Russian is undoubtedly true. The absorption of the Finnic tribes, to which reference has already been made, is an incontrovertible fact, and in other directions the same process went on for centuries. The Cossacks, again, were essentially raiders, and remained such in the Caucasus almost into our own times. They made no scruple to take unto themselves native wives wherever and whenever they could, and there runs in their veins not only Tartar blood but that of the Caucasian mountaineers-Tcherkess, Tchetchen, Koumuik, and others. But only those quite blinded by prejudice can fail to see that, with all their faults, and however backward they may be, the Russians are distinctly Aryans; so that, paradoxical as it may sound, the admitted infiltration of alien blood only bears witness to the strength and persistency of the original type. Any axiomatic proposition must be capable of demonstration conversely. Scratch the Russian and find the Tartar' if you can. Slaver the Tartar as much as you like, you will never find the Russian.

And what of the Caucasus, that Babylonian tower, with the mass of heterogeneous peoples seething at its base? Unity, independence, autonomy, for 7,000,000 of human beings differing in language, race, and religion; from the cultivated Armenian and Georgian down to Khevsoors, Deedos, and other wild mountain tribes, at a lower level of civilisation now than in their own Bronze Age, a thousand years before Christ! Christian, Mussulman, Hebrew, Pagan, speaking a variety of tongues, such as is not to be found on any other equal space of ground on the surface of the globe, from the Arabic used in medrisseh and mosque down to the unwritten marvels of fantastic speech echoed in the remoter mountain fastnesses, whose infinite complexity reminds one that grammar at its highest is the possession of those who have none. The Armenians, with their secret societies, dream of independence; the Georgians of autonomy, the Tartars and tribesmen, doubtless, of recovered licence. But each hates his neighbours. Remove the Russian yoke, let any one race set up for itself, and all the rest will fly at its throat. To anyone who knows the country and its inhabitants, independence, autonomy, in any shape, and above all unity, are impossible, unthinkable. Even the Mussulman majority could not, cannot unite. Shamil for thirty years

strove with sword in one hand-his terrible left-and Koran in the other to weld them into the semblance of a nation; for thirty years he ruled Daghestan and Tchetchnia with a rod of iron; for thirty years he defied the might of Russia, and Shamil failed, Shamil fell, not because Russia was strong, but because

neither love of country nor zeal for religion, though both were wrought to the highest pitch, could keep such heterogeneous elements together.

The granite and gneiss of the central chain dominate in turn the limestones, the chalks, and the tertiary formations. What was lowest is highest. We may almost as soon look for a reversion to the original stratification of the Caucasus as to the establishment of any such agreement amongst the peoples who dwell there as would render independence, autonomy, possible. Russian rule or chaos are the only alternatives.

It is charged against the Russians that they are a listless, apathetic race, whence it is inferred that they will bow their heads meekly to the strokes of fate; but here, again, we have to deal with a half-truth only. Just as the individual moozheek is by turns good-natured and the reverse, so the Russians as a nation are apathetic in general, wildly energetic on occasion. They have just suffered one of the most cruel reverses that ever befell a great and proud people, and it is the fashion to decry them. But their history bears plainly on the face of it the characteristics of a conquering, dominant race; and the story of the Cossack advance, south and east, is a marvel of successful colonisation, and puts the Russians in this respect on a higher level than any but Anglo-Saxons. It is not, perhaps, very remarkable that the Swedes were conquered on land; but they were beaten, too, at sea-and by Peter's infant navy. The Poles have been shamefully treated by all their neighbours, and Russia in relation to Poland appears in the role of big bully, to the indignation of Western Europe. It is forgotten that the Poles, like the Tartars, had it all their own way once, and but for their own folly and failings should have permanently secured the hegemony of the Slav race. They drove the Ukraine Cossacks from them by favouring Jewish exactions and Jesuit intrigues. The governing class oppressed the people, yet ruined the country by its own dissensions. The Poles, in short, have yet to prove their capacity for self-government, their superiority in this respect to the Russians; and the fact is emphasised, not weakened, by the admission that they are a cleverer and more cultured people. What is their attitude now? All classes, of course, aspire to national independence; but when was unity known in Poland? Before 1900 Nationalistic views were in the ascendant; Poland was to work out her own salvation. But differences then began to make themselves felt, and after 'Bloody Sunday' (January 1905) it was agreed, though far from unanimously, to work in unison with the Russian Revolutionists on the understanding that their triumph would bring about the freeing of

Poland more quickly than any independent action. Lately there has been a strong revulsion, due, no doubt, to the partial failure of violent means in Russia, and the Polish Socialistic 'party' has reaffirmed the former policy, and cut itself loose from the revolutionary movement in Russia. This party, however, by no means carries with it the whole of the Polish proletariat, and its change of front and determination to boycott the new Dooma has already led to scenes of violence and even to much bloodshed, particularly at Lodz.

Of the Tartars we have already spoken, and anyone who knows the history of the campaigns in Transcaucasia will admit that not even the English in India showed greater energy, greater valour, more heroic disregard of numerical odds than the Russians under such men as Yermóloff, Madátoff, Kariághin, Kotliarévsky, Paskiévitch, Mouravioff, and a host of others, against the Persians and the Turks. But the war of 1812, after all, is in itself the best refutation of the charge of racial apathy, and those who can believe that the Great Russians would ever accept the position that must of necessity result from the dismemberment of the empire can have read the story of the Napoleonic invasion but to little purpose. Prince Bismarck was no bad judge of men and nations, and Prince Bismarck feared not only Russia but the Russians.

It follows that if the empire of the Tsars is indeed about to fall asunder, which we take leave to doubt, there will be no peace in Eastern Europe until the Russians have once more dominated the majority of the peoples they now rule. If, on the other hand, the dismemberment so confidently predicted as imminent is averted, we can, unhappily, see no reason to anticipate a speedy return to internal tranquillity. Long foretold, long last,' is the sailor's warning, and the storm now raging took ages to brew. The change from autocracy to Constitutional Government, the abolition of the communal system, the necessity for a readjustment of the relations between the dominant race and the other varied ethnic elements of the vast population are but some of the factors in a situation that cannot be solved ambulando. Lookers-on are ever eager to see the end of the game, and their wishes are apt to father their thoughts. But history will hold the present troubles not so very lasting if a generation sees their end.

ART. XI. THE FIRST EARL OF DURHAM AND
COLONIAL ASPIRATION.

1. Life and Letters of the First Earl of Durham (1792-1840). By STUART J. REID, Author of The Life and Times of Sydney Smith,' 'Lord John Russell,' &c. 2 vols. London : Longmans, 1906.

2. The Report of the Earl of Durham, Her Majesty's High Commissioner and Governor-General of British North America. A new edition, with Introductory Note. London: Methuen & Co., 1902.

3. Lord Elgin. By Sir JOHN GEORGE BOURINOT. London : T. C. & E. C. Jack. Toronto: Morang & Co., 1905.

4. Studies in Colonial Nationalism. By RICHARD JEBB. London Edward Arnold, 1905.

IN N countless histories, memoirs, and 'lives and letters,' all the incidents connected with the passing of the great Reform Bill of 1832 have been fully told. These were the heroic years of Whig achievement; and great writers have vied with one another in glowing descriptions of the fierceness of the struggle, and in admiration of the progressive yet firm statesmanship which brought the country through a period of internal storm and danger into the quieter waters of the Victorian age. The portraits of the protagonists in the great strife-Lord Grey and Lord John Russell, Lord Althorp and Lord Broughamare fixed in the minds of their countrymen. There are no new facts to be disclosed; and there is no new light to be shed upon a period whose history all Englishmen who care about history at all already know by heart. Everyone has heard of the carrying of General Gascoigne's motion; of the readiness of King William to dissolve Parliament at a moment's notice though he should have to drive to Westminster in a hackney 'coach'; of the final scene the following year in the House of Lords; of Lord Brougham at the Edinburgh banquet to Lord Grey in 1834. Yet Mr. Stuart Reid has not been afraid to invite us once more to traverse well-worn ground in order to do justice to one of the truest of all Reformers; to whom at the time the most active and advanced wing of the Whig-Radical party looked as a leader, but whose importance and whose influence have been in later times less regarded by his countrymen than they should have been.

Lord Durham, as his biographer points out, was the connecting link between the aristocratic Whig leaders of the Reform party