Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/352

Rh must they keep and push on with the same tireless speed. Great Britain, sur- rounded by the inviolate sea, and safe from even the threat of a hostile foot, has wrought out farther than any other people, perhaps farther than ourselves, the application of principles to civil and constitutional government. But her as yet unwritten, unformulated constitu- tion has had a thousand years for its making.

The nations move on like troops of soldiers in a long and weary march Some reach the place of bivouac and light the camp-fires while others are straggling far behind. Some of the seeming loiterers have been pressing on all the time toward the bivouac as the rear guard, with their faces to the foe ; and others are struggling forward, wounded and disabled, with slow and uncertain step ; and others still, because of less ability, of less forceful energy, but with just as strong determination and just as good a will, find themselves, when night approaches and time for halt has come, far from the bivouac and the front. Around one nation gleam the watch-fires of the twentieth century; another is fifty years behind ; a third is groping still among the breaking shadows of the eighteenth century, and yet another has only of late emerged from the darkness of the middle ages.

To the close of the middle ages in western and southern Europe are as- signed different dates. There modern times began four or five hundred years ago, perhaps when Constantinople fell or when L,uther and Raphael were born or when America was discovered. Then universal disorder ceased ; centralized states stood forth ; the various peoples felt new thrills of national life. With the ascent of the boy, Peter, to the throne the middle ages were ended in Russia. That was in 1689. Thus in the onward progress the inhabitant of other parts of Europe had by two hundred and fifty years the start of the Russian.

The Russian had been left thus far in the rear by no fault of his own. In natural endowment the Slav is not in- ferior to the Latin or the Teuton or the Celt. Geographic conditions and geo- graphic environment determined Rus- sian history and molded Russian nature. In that enormous plain, which consti- tutes the Russia of today, mountains, at once a bulwark and defense and inspi- ration, were denied him. The Scotch, the Swiss, like the Vaudois Christian, could sing:

" For the strength of the hills we bless Thee, Oh ! God, our father's God ; Thou hast made thy children mighty By the touch of the mountain sod."

But the dwellers of the plain, exposed to attack from every side in a wild and lawless age, had no other destiny than to suffer and endure.

After the barbaric invasions ceased in western Europe, for generations count- less Asiatic hosts roamed over Russia, sparsely populated and difficult of de- fense, and devastated the land at will. Moreover, the sunless forest and dreary steppe wrought upon human nature their repressive influence. Physical con- ditions fashion character as the sculptor shapes the clay. Thence were devel- oped those traits of sluggish patience, of long endurance, of morbid self-sacri- fice which distinctly mark the Russian people today.

In most countries each political or economic advance has derived its first impulse from popular feeling which swelled into a resistless demand upon authority — that is, the progress has begun from below and worked upward.