ssination of Alexander II.
The Peasants' Wreath
Alexander III.
A Joyless Reign
His Death

CHAPTER XXVI.

Nicholas II.
Russification of Finland
Invitation to Disarmament
Brief Review of Conditions

SUPPLEMENT.

Conditions Preceding Russo-Japanese War
Nature of Dispute
Results of Conflict
Peace Conference at Portsmouth
Treaty Signed
A National Assembly
Dissolution of First Russian Parliament
Present Outlook

LIST OF PRINCES.

INDEX.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Peter the Great . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

The Czar Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan Ivanovitch

The Coronation of the Czar Alexander III., 1883

Scene during the Russo-Japanese War: Russian
soldiers on the march in Manchuria

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA

CHAPTER I

PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS AND RACES

The topography of a country is to some extent a prophecy of its future.
Had there been no Mississippi coursing for three thousand miles through
the North American Continent, no Ohio and Missouri bisecting it from
east to west, no great inland seas indenting and watering it, no
fertile prairies stretching across its vast areas, how different would
have been the history of our own land.

Russia is the strange product of strange physical conditions. Nature
was not in impetuous mood when she created this greater half of Europe,
nor was she generous, except in the matter of space. She was slow,
sluggish, but inexorable. No volcanic energies threw up rocky ridges
and ramparts in Titanic rage, and then repentantly clothed them with
lovely verdure as in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. No hungry sea rushed
in and tore her coast into fragments. It would seem to have been just
a cold-blooded experiment in subjecting a vast region to the most
rigorous and least generous conditions possible, leaving it unshielded
alike from Polar winds in winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting
it of beauty and of charm, and then casting this arid, frigid, torpid
land to a branch of the human family as unique as its own habitation;
separating it by natural and almost impassable barriers from civilizing
influences, and in strange isolation leaving it to work out its own
problem of development.

We have only to look on the map at the ragged coast-lines of Greece,
Italy, and the British Isles to realize how powerful a factor the sea
has been in great civilizations. Russia, like a thirsty giant, has for
centuries bee