nd to develop the colonising
and conquering agencies of her maturer years. They may be summed up in
the single word, "Cossacks."

The Cossacks are often spoken of as though they were a race. They are
not; they are bands or communities, partly military, partly nomadic or
agricultural, as the case may be. They can be traced back to bands of
outlaws who in the time of Russia's weakness roamed about on the verge
of her settlements, plundering indifferently their Slavonic kinsmen, or
the Tartars and Turks farther south. They were the "men of the plain,"
who had fled from the villages of the Slavs, or (in fewer cases) from
the caravans of the Tartars, owing to private feuds, or from love of a
freer and more lucrative life than that of the village or the
encampment. In this debatable land their numbers increased until, Slavs
though they mainly were, they became a menace to the growing power of
the Czars. Ivan the Terrible sent expeditions against them, transplanted
many of their number, and compelled those who remained in the space
between the rivers Don and Ural to submit to his authority, and to give
military service in time of war in return for rights of pasturage and
tillage in the districts thenceforth recognised as their own. Some of
them transferred their energies to Asia; and it was a Cossack outlaw,
Jermak, who conquered a great part of Siberia. The Russian pioneers, who
early penetrated into Siberia or Turkestan, found it possible at a later
time to use these children of the plain as a kind of protective belt
against the warlike natives. The same use was made of them in the South
against Turks. Catharine II. broke the power of the "Zaporoghians"
(Cossacks of the Dnieper), and settled large numbers of them on the
River Kuban to fight the Circassians.

In short, out of the driftwood and wreckage of their primitive social
system the Russians framed a bulwark against the swirling currents of
the nomad world outside. In some respects the Cossacks resemble the
roving bands of Saxons and Franks who pushed forward roughly but
ceaselessly the boundaries of the Teutonic race[276]. But, whereas those
offshoots soon came to have a life of their own, apart from the parent
stems, Russia, on the other hand, has known how to keep a hold on her
boisterous youth, turning their predatory instincts against her worst
neighbours, and using them as hardy irregulars in her wars.

[Footnote 276: See Caesar, _Gallic War_, bk. vi., for an ac