a vast breeding-ground for an
illiterate peasantry, and the forecasts of its future greatness entirely
ignore that dwindling significance of mere numbers in warfare which is
the clear and necessary consequence of mechanical advance. To a large
extent, I believe, the Western Slavs will follow the Prussians and
Lithuanians, and be incorporated in the urbanization of Western Europe,
and the remoter portions of Russia seem destined to become--are indeed
becoming--Abyss, a wretched and disorderly Abyss that will not even be
formidable to the armed and disciplined peoples of the new civilization,
the last quarter of the earth, perhaps, where a barbaric or absentee
nobility will shadow the squalid and unhappy destinies of a multitude of
hopeless and unmeaning lives.

To a certain extent, Russia may play the part of a vaster Ireland, in
her failure to keep pace with the educational and economic progress of
nations which have come into economic unity with her. She will be an
Ireland without emigration, a place for famines. And while Russia delays
to develop anything but a fecund orthodoxy and this simple peasant life,
the grooves and channels are growing ever deeper along which the
currents of trade, of intellectual and moral stimulus, must presently
flow towards the West. I see no region where anything like the
comparatively dense urban regions that are likely to arise about the
Rhineland and over the eastern states of America, for example, can
develop in Russia. With railways planned boldly, it would have been
possible, it might still be possible, to make about Odessa a parallel to
Chicago, but the existing railways run about Odessa as though Asia were
unknown; and when at last the commercial awakening of what is now the
Turkish Empire comes, the railway lines will probably run, not north or
south, but from the urban region of the more scientific central
Europeans down to Constantinople. The long-route land communications in
the future will become continually more swift and efficient than Baltic
navigation, and it is unlikely, therefore, that St. Petersburg has any
great possibilities of growth. It was founded by a man whose idea of the
course of trade and civilization was the sea wholly and solely, and in
the future the sea must necessarily become more and more a last resort.
With its spacious prospects, its architectural magnificence, its
political quality, its desertion by the new commerce, and its terrible
peasant hinterla