dering the duration and severity of the
winters, and the large proportion of unavailable lands, I do not think
it can ever become very productive in an agricultural point of view.
Between fifty and fifty-five degrees latitude, embracing the valley of
the Volga, is a more favored region, abounding in fertile lands, and
the summers are longer, but the winters are still severe, especially
in the eastern portions. From latitude forty-three to fifty, embracing
portions of Kief, the Caucasus, and other southern possessions of the
empire, the winters are comparatively temperate, and the summers warm
and long; but here, again, a great portion of this country consists of
mountains, arid plains, and deserts, and it is subject to extreme and
terrible droughts. Here is a vast extent of territory, comprising
about one hundred and sixty-five degrees of longitude and thirty-five
of latitude, which contains within its limits a greater variety of bad
climates, and a greater amount of land unavailable for any purposes of
human life, than any equal compass of territory upon the globe, if we
except Africa, which is at least doubtful. Within the limits of this
vast, and, for the most part, inhospitable region, we find nearly all
the races who, as far back as the history of mankind dates, have been
the most addicted to predatory wars, and the indulgence of every
savage propensity growing out of an untamable nature--Tartars,
Cossacks, gipsies, Turks, Circassians, Georgians, etc., and the
Russians proper, whose wild Sclavonic blood contains very nearly all
the vices and virtues that circulate through the veins of all these
races, besides many enterprising and unscrupulous traits of character
to which the inferior tribes could never aspire. Here we have a mixed
population, estimated in 1856 at seventy-one millions, including North
American possessions and tributary tribes, a great part of it composed
of totally incongruous elements, and with a variety of religions,
embracing about nine millions of Roman, Armenian, and irregular Greek
Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Israelites, and Buddhists--the
national creed being the Greco-Russe, which, it is estimated, is
professed by about fifty millions of the inhabitants, including, of
course, infants and young children, and many others who know nothing
about it. To keep all these incongruous elements in order, and provide
against foreign invasion, requires a standing army of 577,859 troops
"for grand