Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/96

80 wonder that the expression travailler pour le Roi de Prusse should have become as proverbial in Russia as in France. The huge area of the Russian Empire has naturally encouraged the belief that Russian policy is determined by lust of territory, that Russia must be systematically aggressive, and must have ever encroached on her neighbours. We forget that Russia is only obeying the irresistible expansion of the race, that Russia already in the seventeenth century had reached the far eastern plains of Asia. We forget that the growth of Russia is but the natural growth of a prolific race which increases at present at the rate of more than three millions a year, notwithstanding an enormous infant mortality. Even if Russia did not add one square mile to her territory, her population in twenty-five years would still have increased by one hundred millions. But notwithstanding that enormous accretion of population, Russia for the last hundred years has not expanded in Europe, and her expansion outside of Europe is small compared with the expansion of the British Empire. The huge Siberian plain was a terra nullius and the hinterland of the European plain.