8th Jan.
In the most recent volume of Mr. A. R. Colquhoun (lately reviewed in these columns) there is a clear and compendious statement of the processes by which the great Russian Empire came to expand over the northern part of the Asiatic continent until it touched the Pacific Ocean, since which time it has been by a resist ess instinct pressing southward with its front to the sea, until its progress seems to have brought it face to face with the interests of a great pare of Europe as well as with japan. There was a long period in which by reason of isolation and remoteness this process attracted no attention in the West. As Mr. Colquhoun reminds us, at the very time when the Crimean war seemed to have checked the ambition of Russia for an indefinite period, she was adding other empires to her already enormous domains, until without a shot fired, and by a simple stroke of the pen, the mouth of one of the greatest rivers of Asia was indisputably hers and its left bank for hundred of miles—with much more in the immediate or distant prospect. "England was made by her adventurers," says one of the mottoes in the Greenwich Museum. Russia, in like manner has been made by her adventurers, who have pushed on with a strange mixture of blind impulse and unconscious foresight. until the time was ripe for the Government to take up the work which was too large for individual enterprise. The standards and the ideals of Russia and of the Russians are very different from those to which we are accustomed, and we see a great deal to criticise in the brutal harshness of her methods, and in the undisguised barbarism of much which seems inseparable from her policy She appears to be selfish, cunning, and irresistible. What predicates may be—ought to be—attached to the name Finland! What is to become of the Finns, and of those numerous and almost unknown religionists whom it seems to be the steady and deliberate plan of the Russian Government to crush out, to annihilate by complete absorption? When we contemplate the varied phenomena which. the advance of Russia during the past century embraces, we not improbably cordially second the view perhaps best expressed by the American poet Whittier:
"Fell Spider of the North Stretching thy great feelers forth, Within whose web the freedom dies Of nations eaten up as flies."
It is common to attribute the amazing development, and the phenomenal success in the plans concomitant upon the development of the Russian Empire, to the almost supernatural foresight and wisdom of Peter the Great, as expressed in his celebrated will. The document which passes under that name is supposed to be a literary forgery, somewhat analogous to the fraud perpetrated in the discovery of the Poems of Ossian—which might have been genuine, whether they were or not. But to believe that any single individual, no matter what his foresight, insight, or endowments, could administer to the heterogeneous and polyglot Empire which he rules such a hypodermic injection of prophetic faith and such a talent for unification of effort running down through two centuries, is to suppose what, apart from the peculiar history of the Jewish race, has never occurred, so
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.