stands first in the life of every Russian, from the highest
official of the cumbrous governmental machine down to the humblest
descendant of the serfs; both of whom, with every member of every class
between them, lives, and for ten centuries _have_ lived, at the mercy
of that grim and terrible,--_climate_.

It has for some years been the custom among certain foreign nations,
notably the great English-speaking mother and her rebellious offspring,
to set forth, in various forms of print, many individual opinions of
Russia, its people, and its government. Here all the scribbling of the
quasi-authoritative, statistical variety has lately focussed itself,
bursting forth in a very tornado of long-winded, vilificacious
ignorance. Certain subjects may be suitable vehicles for the exploiting
of this species of personal vanity. But of them the most incongruous,
and the most abused, has been the great, white, silent, unprotesting
land. Nothing about it, from its origin to its beverages, but has had to
bear the brunt of outrageous comment, for which the justification
proffered is usually some six weeks' summer residence in the capital,
and perhaps one or two brief "arranged" conversations (by means of an
interpreter), with an official of the third or fourth grade. Such the
source of many a book; though the few English-speaking foreigners who
have enjoyed ten or more years of residence among the Russian people,
would be slow to make a single generalization anent that remarkable
race.

In this class of writings, however, and even among articles of a better
type, there is, strangely enough, nowhere to be found so much as a
straw's weight of stress laid upon the relentless, indestructible cause
of so many of the woes of a country whose struggle for the bare means of
subsistence has been Titanic. Nowhere is there any analysis of the power
that has won so many victories against the one implacable enemy of
Russia: nowhere any suggestion of the million strategic _coups_ by which
a handful of feeble human beings have again and again defeated this
gigantic force. Above all, has no one ever given pause to the
unquestionable fact that, supposing Russia to be (what she is not) five
hundred years behind the rest of European civilization, she has had but
one month out of the other nations' two, in which to progress. If her
armies be worse drilled, less hardy, than those of her enemies, it is
because they live their soldier-lives for scarcely one