ssian arms cannot stop until they
reach the frontier of some stable power. In short, to those
Russophobists in England who look with such alarm upon the approach of
the Russians toward India, he calmly replies that this approach is both
inevitable and desirable! No wonder he tells his countrymen that it is
their duty to know Russia better. It is plainly impossible to even
review in the most concise manner the numerous important discussions in
this remarkable book, without producing another book in doing so. Mr.
Wallace's work is one of the most valuable studies in social and
governmental economy ever written, and several causes, aside from his
personal fidelity and fitness, combine to make it so. In general,
Russian society exhibits, so far as the peasantry are concerned, a
simplicity of life and thought that carries the imagination
irresistibly back to prehistoric times. No civilized race, no
_culturvolk_, presents such aboriginal relations in its family and
commonwealth. The nobles, on the other hand, and all the cultured
class, are fermenting with great views and plans of social reform. The
ideas that made such havoc in the early days of the French revolution
have again swept within human vision, but this time they were caught up
by a practical-minded Emperor and crystallized into the greatest
premeditated political reform of this century! The wonderful feat of
quietly emancipating forty million bonded servitors, at one stroke, the
institution on a tremendous scale of what the dreamers have declared to
be the classic relation of social man--communism, the division of land,
taking about one-half from the rich and giving it to the poor--such
marvels as these throw a halo of Arabian magic about the history of
this simple people since 1861. When to these attractions is added the
fact that this land of social classicity and political ideals is
entirely accessible to study, as no other nation of like simple culture
is, we think that reasons enough have been given for saying that our
author has chosen the ripest field in the world for his harvest labors.
He has shown himself a most conscientious and able worker in it, and
our own country will be fortunate if the social revolution that has
taken place in its Southern States ever finds so unprejudiced and
painstaking a historian as he. To Americans Mr. Wallace's book should
be more interesting and valuable than to any other readers, for many of
these questions which he discuss