Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/78

 From the time of Catherine the Second, the Russian State clearly conceived and consistently strove to carry into effect the policy of advance towards the South. Catherine, by securing the freedom of navigation in the Black Sea, made Black Sea trade possible. The colonisation of the shores of the Black Sea laid the foundation of the agricultural production of the region, the free outlet of agricultural products to the sea being again the necessary consequence of the colonisation.

Often when one speaks of the traditional struggle carried on by Russia with Turkey, the conqueror of the Byzantine Empire, it is forgotten that this struggle has been waged in reality not by armies, not by the fleet, but by the agriculturist, who has turned steppes periodically laid waste by nomadic invaders into an extremely rich agricultural region, with a large Russian population. Without any offence to our gallant army, we can say that not by her infantry and artillery, but by her agricultural colonisation followed in the nineteenth century by the industrial development of the colonised area, has Russia defeated Turkey on the Black Sea. And in consequence Serbia was freed from the Turkish yoke and Bulgaria was called to life—this is a fact which must be borne in mind—by the Russian peasant as well as by the Russian soldier. This fact is a striking confirmation of the deep saying of your Ruskin: "The true history of a nation is not of its wars but of its households." The Russian peasant in less than a century built up a great Russian settlement on the Northern Pontus, whilst centuries of Turkish dominion in parts of Pontus still more blessed by