Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/144

 that in the far north of Siberia you may find curious reminiscences of the wisdom of the Ganges, all kinds of curious relics of customs, half familiar to us and half unknown. But on the other hand there are several ethnic units which have by various means in various ways grasped the apparatus of civilisation for themselves and have attained the rank of nationalities, and it is with these nationalities that I particularly wish to deal in these lectures.

The position of the nationalities of the Russian Empire is not quite so strange, not quite so foreign, as it seems at first sight to Englishmen. After all, there is a very close analogy with our British Empire. Take the ordinary Russian University, such Russian Universities as those of Petrograd and Moscow. You will find there in certain respects a very close analogy even with Cambridge; I mean so far as the character of the students goes. Here in Cambridge there are, or were, English students from various countries, there are Scotchmen, Irishmen, South Africans, English and Dutch, there are Indians from various parts of India, there are French Canadians and British Canadians, there are many from the Straits Settlements, from Australia and New Zealand. You will find something of the same kind of thing in Petrograd or Moscow: you will find not only Russian students there but Poles, Armenians, Georgians, Tartars, and lately even Turcomans, who in a work published in England about thirty years ago were called, quite rightly, "the man-stealing Turcomans." The difference between the British Empire and the Russian Empire is that in Russia there are no dividing oceans. If we could