Page:The tourist's Russia by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/20

2 destroying floods and nearly insuperable impediments. The spirit of Peter was also in Catherine the Second's reign. She imported not only workmen from abroad, but intellects as well. Gradually, as one sovereign succeeded another, the Russians reluctantly acknowledged that some good thing might come out of the rest of Europe. Foreigners were admitted as instructors in manufacture, trade and tactics, and the educated began to acquire the languages of their tutors, with proverbial facility.

Nevertheless, it was an Eastern nation which most influenced Russia's metamorphosis. Japan, epitomising Western aggression in yellow garb, sounded the alarum which aroused the giant from stupor and apathy. Before Port Arthur, Russia was of the East; to-day her ideals are Western. Seven years after the close of the Japanese war, she mothers an industrial advance which enthusiasts like to compare to that of America. In the evolution of her cities Russia is also likened to the United States and Canada. The wooden Moscow of dim arcades and easy-going commerce is complemented by a dazzling city of brilliant boulevards and monster enterprises. In Kiev, new steel structures rub elbows with memorials of antiquity which substantiate