immovable. The spot where Petersburg now
stands had been for a thousand years past contested ground between Fins,
Swedes, and Russians. All the remaining extent of coast from Polangen,
near Memel, to Torrea, the whole coast of the Black Sea, from Akerman to
Redut Kaleh, has been conquered later on. And, as if to witness the
anti-maritime peculiarity of the Slavonic race, of all this line of
coast, no portion of the Baltic coast has really adopted Russian
nationality. Nor has the Circassian and Mingrelian east coast of the
Black Sea. It is only the coast of the White Sea, as far as it was worth
cultivating, some portion of the northern coast of the Black Sea, and
part of the coast of the Sea of Azof, that have really been peopled with
Russian inhabitants, who, however, despite the new circumstances in
which they are placed, still refrain from taking to the sea, and
obstinately stick to the land-lopers' traditions of their ancestors.

From the very outset, Peter the Great broke through all the traditions
of the Slavonic race. "It is water that Russia wants." These words he
addressed as a rebuke to Prince Cantemir are inscribed on the title-page
of his life. The conquest of the Sea of Azof was aimed at in his first
war with Turkey, the conquest of the Baltic in his war against Sweden,
the conquest of the Black Sea in his second war against the Porte, and
the conquest of the Caspian Sea in his fraudulent intervention in
Persia. For a system of local encroachment, land was sufficient; for a
system of universal aggression, water had become indispensable. It was
but by the conversion of Muscovy from a country wholly of land into a
sea-bordering empire, that the traditional limits of the Muscovite
policy could be superseded and merged into that bold synthesis which,
blending the encroaching method of the Mongol slave with the
world-conquering tendencies of the Mongol master, forms the life-spring
of modern Russian diplomacy.

It has been said that no great nation has ever existed, or been able to
exist, in such an inland position as that of the original empire of
Peter the Great; that none has ever submitted thus to see its coasts and
the mouths of its rivers torn away from it; that Russia could no more
leave the mouth of the Neva, the natural outlet for the produce of
Northern Russia, in the hands of the Swedes, than the mouths of the Don,
Dnieper, and Bug, and the Straits of Kertch, in the hands of nomadic and
plundering Tar