--ought
to be as productive as on the north coast of America, this
difference, which has arisen only recently, is very striking. It
appears to me to be capable of explanation in the following way.
Down to our days a large number of small savage tribes in America
have carried on war with each other, the weaker, to escape
extermination by the more powerful races, being compelled to flee to
the ice deserts of the north, deeming themselves fortunate if they
could there, in peace from their enemies, earn a living by adopting
the mode of life of the Polar races, suitable as it is to the
climate and resources of the land. The case was once the same in
Siberia, and there are many indications that fragments of conquered
tribes have been in former times driven up from the south, not only
to the north coast of the mainland, but also beyond it to the
islands lying off it. In Siberia, however, for the last 250 years,
the case has been completely changed by the Russian conquest of the
country. The pressure of the new government has, notwithstanding
many single acts of violence, been on the whole less destructive to
the original population than the influence which the Europeans have
exerted in America. The Russian power has at least held a wholly
beneficial influence, inasmuch as it has prevented the continual
feuds between the native races. The tribes driven to the
inhospitable North have been enabled to return to milder regions,
and where this has not taken place they have, in the absence of new
migrations from the South, succumbed in the fight with cold, hunger,
and small-pox, or other diseases introduced by their new masters. ]

[Footnote 272: Cornelis de Bruin, _Reizen over Moskovie, door Persie
en Indie_, &c., Amsterdam, 1711, p. 12. The author's name is also
written De Bruyn and Le Brun. ]

[Footnote 273: Herodotus already states in book iv. chapter 196, that
the Carthagenians bartered goods in the same way with a tribe living
on the coast of Africa beyond the Gates of Hercules. The same mode
of barter was still in use nearly two thousand years later, when the
west coast of Africa was visited by the Venetian Cadamosto, in 1454
(_Ramusio_, i., 1588, leaf 100). ]

[Footnote 274: As security for the subjection of the conquered races,
the Russians were accustomed to take a number of men and women from
their principal families as hostages. These persons were called
_amanates_, and were kept in a sort of slavery at the fixed wint