nderstood to have originated in religious fanaticism.
These events go to illustrate the enormous influence on politics which
Religion, whether you call it enthusiasm or superstition, exercises
everywhere in Asia.

But of all empires in Asia, the Russian empire is the greatest and the
most powerful. I have only space to say here that it is of the same
type with the others; it is a vast dominion over an infinite variety
of races, tribes, and creeds; it is a government which has come in by
foreign conquest; a Christian Power which has among its subjects a
great number of Mohammedans. It differs from our Indian empire in this
respect, that the Russian conquests were made gradually by land,
across Central Asia, or by slow immigration and extension, as in
Siberia, whereas the English reached India by a long sea-journey. So
that in the Asiatic empire of Russia the separation of race between
the rulers and their subjects is not so sharply defined as between
England and India. Nevertheless the problems that confront Russia in
Asia are similar in kind to those which face us in India; she has to
reconcile to her permanent dominion a miscellany of alien peoples,
whom it is almost impossible to fuse and consolidate into anything
like a nationality.

I have now endeavoured, very imperfectly, to show how Race and
Religion still powerfully affect society, and trouble politics,
throughout a great part of the world. How far they influence and
interact upon each other is a difficult problem; but one may say that
some religions seem to accord with the peculiar temperament and
intellectual disposition of certain races; that, for instance, the
active propagating spirit of Islam flourishes in Western Asia, while
in Eastern Asia a quiet and contemplative faith, with little
missionary impulse, no strong desire to make converts, has always
prevailed. But in the East everywhere Race and Religion still unite
and isolate the populations in groups--they are the great dividing and
disturbing forces that prevent or delay the consolidation of settled
nationalities; and so far as our experience goes, a fixed nationality
of the Western type is the most solid and permanent form of political
government and social aggregation. An empire is a different and looser
mode of binding people together, yet at certain stages of civilisation
and the world's progress it is a necessity; and an empire well
administered is the best available instrument for promoting
c