ETHNOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTION OF RELIGIONS
The Finn has become Christian; the Turk or Tatar, Moslem; the Mongol, Buddhist: to this ethnological distribution of religion there are few exceptions. Hereto are attributable the causes of the widely different destinies of these three groups — particularly the neighbouring Finns and Tatars. It is religion which has prepared the one for its European existence; it is religion which has made that existence impossible for the other. Islam has given the Tatar a higher and more precocious civilisation; it has inspired him to build flourishing cities like the ancient Sarai and Kazan, and to found powerful states in Europe and Asia; it has achieved for him a brilliant past, while exposing him to a future full of difficulties: while saving him from absorption into Europe, it has left him completely outside the gate of modern civilisation.
It is the Tatars who have given to the Russians the name of Mongols, to which the Tatars themselves have but a questionable right. In any case the title is not applicable to the true Russians, who have at most but a drop or two of Mongol blood in their veins, and less of Tatar than the Spaniards have of Moorish or Arab.
At the same time with the process of absorption and assimilation of the Finnish element, another process has for centuries been going on — an inverse process of secretion and elimination of the Tatar and Moslem elements which Russia found herself unable to assimilate. After their submission a great number of Tatars left Russia, being unwilling to become the subjects of the infidels whose masters they had been. Before the progress of Christianity they spontaneously retreated to the lands still dominated by the law of the prophet. After the destruction of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, they tended to concentrate in the Crimea and the neighbouring straits — in what up to the eighteenth century was known as Little Tartary; after the conquest of the Crimea by Catherine II they took their way still farther toward the empire of their Turkish brethren. Even in our own time, after the war of Sebastopol and after the conquest of the Caucasus, the emigration of the Tatars and the Nogaians began again on an enormous scale, together with that of the Circassians. In the Crimea the Tatar population, already diminished by one-half in the time of Catherine II, is today scarcely one-fifth of what it was at the time of the annexation to Russia. The introduction of obligatory military service in the year 1874 drove them out in large numbers. By defeat and voluntary exile have the Tatars been reduced to insignificant groups in a country where, formerly, they reigned for centuries — in some parts of which even they were the sole inhabitants.6
THE SLAVS
As to the Slavs, who form the nucleus of the Russian population, it is now generally recognised that they migrated to Russia from the neighbourhood of the Carpathian Mountains. The Byzantine annalists of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries, speaking of the Slavs, whom they called Sklaboi, a name appearing as early as the end of the fifth century, distinguish two branches of them: the Ants, living from the Danube to the mouth of the Dnieper; and the Slavs, properly so named, living northeast of j, the Danube and as far to the east as the source of the Vistula, and on the l\ right bank of the Dniester. In this, their statement agrees with that of / Jornandes,* the historian of the Goths. Some Russian scholars suppose
that before coming to the Danube the Slavs lived near the Carpathians, whence they invaded the Byzantine empire. These encroachments, beginning as far back as the third century, resulted in the penetration of the Slavs into southern Austria and the Balkan peninsula. Byzantine annalists of the sixth and seventh centuries, Procopius and the emperor Maurice, who had to fight the Slavs in person, speak of them as being ever on the move: " They live in woods and on the banks of rivers, in small hamlets, and are always ready to change their abode." At the same time these Byzantine annalists describe this people as exceedingly fond of liberty. " From the remotest period," says Procopius,d " the Slavs were known to live as democracies; they discussed their wants in popular assemblies or folkmotes." "The Slavs are fond of liberty," writes the emperor Maurice6; "they cannot bear unlimited rulers, and are not easily brought to submission." The same anguage is used also by the emperor Leo./ "The Slavs," says he, "are a free people, strongly opposed to any subjection." If the Byzantine historians do not speak of the invasion of the Slavs into the limits of the empire during the second part of the seventh century, it is because their migration took at this time another direction: from the Carpathians they moved toward the Vistula and the Dnieper.
During the ninth century, the time of the founding of the first principalities, the Dnieper, with its numerous affluents on both sides, formed the limit of the Slavonic settlements to the east. This barrier was broken only by the Viatitchi, stretching as far to the northeast as the source of the Oka. On the north the Slavs reached the great Valdai plateau from which Russia's largest rivers descend, and the southern part of the great lake region, that of Ilmen.c
A Finnish Costume
There is no indication that the race is deficient in genius. It was the Slavs who opened the way to the west by two great movements which inaugurated the modern era — the Renaissance and the Reformation; by thediscovery of the laws that govern the universe, and the plea for liberty of thought. The Pole Copernicus was the herald of Galileo; the Czech, John Huss, the precursor of Luther. Poland and Bohemia, the two Slav peoples most nearly connected with the west by neighbourhood and religion, can cite a long list of men distinguished in letters, science, politics, and war. Ragusa alone could furnish an entire gallery of men talented along all lines. There where remoteness from the west and foreign oppression have made study impossible and prevented single names from becoming widely known, the people have manifested their genius in songs which lack none of the qualities inherent in the most splendid poetry of the west. In that popular impersonal literature which we admire so frankly in the romanceros of Spam, the ballads of Scotland and Germany, the Slav, far from yielding the palm to the Latin or the Teuton, perhaps excels both. Nothing more truly poetical exists than the pesmes of Servia or the doumas of Little Russia; for, by a sort of natural compensation, it is among the Slavs least initiated into western culture that popular poetry has flowered most freely.
In temperament and character the Slavs present an ensemble of defects and qualities which unite them more nearly with the Latins and Celts than with their neighbours the Germans. They are characterised by a vivacity, a warmth, a mobility, a petulance, an exuberance not always found to the same degree among even the peoples of the south. Among the Slavs of purer blood these characteristics have marked their political life with a mobile, inconstant, and anarchical spirit which has rendered extremely difficult their national existence and which, taken with their geographical position, has been the great obstacle in the way of their civilisation. The distinguishing faculty of the race is a certain flexibility and elasticity of temperament and character which render it adaptable to the reception and the reproduction of all sorts of diverse ideas; the imitative faculty of the Slavs is well known. This gift is everywhere distributed among them; this Slav malleability, peculiar alike to Pole and Russian, is perhaps fundamentally but a result of their historical progress and of their geographical position. But lately entered in at the gate of civilisation, and during long years inferior to the neighbouring races, they have always gone to school to the others; instead of living by their own invention, they have lived by borrowing, and the imitative spirit has become their ruling faculty, having been for them the most useful as well as the most widely exercised.