ich will make it impossible that a great part of
a frozen continent shall be dedicated to the use of suffering human
beings, kept there by the will of one man. There will be something in
the air which will forbid cruelty and compel mercy and justice, and
which will make men or nations feign those virtues if they have them
not.

The antagonism between England and Russia has a deeper significance
than appears on the surface. It is not the Eastern question, not the
control of Constantinople, not the obtaining of concessions from China
which is at stake. It is the question which of two principles shall
prevail. The one represented by a despotism in which the people have
no part, or the one represented by a system of government through which
the will of the people freely acts. There can be but one result in
such a conflict, one answer to such a question. The eternal purposes
are writ too large in the past to mistake them. And it is the ardent
hope of America that Russia--that Empire which has so generously
accorded us her friendship in our times of peril--may not by cataclysm
from within, but of her own volition, place herself fully in line with
the ideals of an advanced civilization.

SUPPLEMENT TO SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA

From Rurik to Nicholas III. the policy of Russia has been determined by
its thirst for the sea. Every great struggle in the life of this
colossal land-locked empire has had for its ultimate object the opening
of a door to the ocean, from which nature has ingeniously excluded it.
In the first centuries of its existence Rurik and his descendants were
incessantly hurling themselves against the door leading to the
Mediterranean. But the door would not yield. Then Ivan IV. and his
descendants, with no greater success, hammered at the door leading to
the West. The thirst growing with defeat became a national instinct.
When Peter the Great first looked out upon the sea, at Archangel, and
when he created that miniature navy upon the Black Sea, and when he
dragged his capital from "Holy Moscow" to the banks of the Neva,
planting it upon that submerged tract, he was impelled by the same
instinct which is to-day making history in the Far East.

It was in 1582 that Yermak, the Cossack robber and pirate, under
sentence of death, won a pardon from Ivan IV. ("the Terrible") in
exchange for Siberia--that unknown region stretching across the
Continent of Asia to the Pacific. Eight hundred Cossacks