Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/84

 territory which presents the utmost variety as regards the fundamental conditions which determine economic life. Forming for customs purposes a single territory—with the exception of Finland, an exception which is really an anomaly, to be explained by purely historical reasons, simply because at the time of the annexation of Finland it was impossible to establish a proper customs control over the long coast line of the new territory—and with a population the vast majority of which lives under the same code of civil law, Russia is yet a complex of territories in different economic conditions and in different stages of economic development. It is just this which makes Russia at the present moment an Empire from the economic point of view, no matter what the aims of her State policy may be, and quite independently of any "Imperialism."

The building up of this enormous State was no matter of chance: it is no chance that in that State there should be a single national nucleus to which the hegemony naturally belongs. It was the consequence of the fact that only as a politically united whole could the land make progress in all respects, and that only a single ethnical element—that which formed the Muscovite State—possessed the political talent required. But this political structure,—a complex of widely differing economic regions united in the form of an Empire,—and the predominance of the Russian element, impose, and particularly in the economic sphere, an enormous burden of responsibility. To whom much is given, of him will much be required.

And much has been given. In the first place, as regards the more important of the cereals which are