oise of the Teutons,
neither do they appear to possess that logical faculty which, in spite
of many wayward outbursts of passion, generally enables the Latin races
in the end to cast off idealism when it tends to lapse altogether from
sanity; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that, having by
association acquired some portion of that Western faculty, the Russians
misapply it. They seem to be impelled by a variety of causes--such as
climatic and economic influences, a long course of misgovernment,
Byzantinism in religion, and an inherited leaning to Oriental
mysticism--to distort their reasoning powers, and far from using them,
as was the case with the pre-eminently sane Greek genius, to temper the
excesses of the imagination, to employ them rather as an oestrus to lash
the imaginative faculties to a state verging on madness.

If the Russians are not Europeans, neither are they thorough Asiatics.
It may well be, as De Voguee says, that they have preserved the idiom
and even the features of their original Aryan ancestors to a greater
extent than has been the case with other Aryan nations who finally
settled farther West, and that this is a fact of which many Russians
boast. But, for all that, they have been inoculated with far too strong
a dose of Western culture, religion, and habits of thought to display
the apathy or submit to the fatalism which characterises the conduct of
the true Eastern.

If, therefore, the Russians are neither Europeans nor Asiatics, what are
they? Manifestly their geographical position and other attendant
circumstances have, from an ethnological point of view, rendered them a
hybrid race, whose national development will display the most startling
anomalies and contradictions, in which the theory and practice derived
from the original Oriental stock will be constantly struggling for
mastery with an Occidental aftergrowth. From the earliest days there
have been two types of Russian reformers, viz. on the one hand, those
who wished that the country should be developed on Eastern lines, and,
on the other, those who looked to Western civilisation for guidance. De
Voguee says that from the accession of Peter the Great to the death of
the Emperor Nicolas--that is to say, for a period of a hundred and
fifty years--the government of Russia may be likened to a ship, of
which the captain and the principal officers were persistently
endeavouring to steer towards the West, while at the same time the