Napoleon said, "Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tartar." Fifty years later, Tourgenieff, one of the greatest writers Russia has produced, remarked : " The trouble with us Russians is that the Tartar is so close behind us. We are a semi-barbarous people still. We put Parisian kid gloves on our hands instead of washing them. At one moment we bow and utter polite phrases, and then go home and flog our servants."

During the present century the empire of the Tsar has made enormous progress, but great bodies move slowly, and Russia is colossal. Russia has been compared to a giant sleeping under a shroud of snow. It occupies one-seventh of the entire land surface of our globe. The empire of Rome would have had to multiply itself four times to fill it. It could receive within its limits two such republics as the United States, including the mighty area of Alaska, and even then have room for Mexico, Great Britain, Germany, and France. In fact, the size of Russia, in one way, constitutes its weakness. Communication there is slow and difficult. The average population is but two inhabitants to the square mile. In Europe it is forty. The heterogeneous character of its people, too, is a disadvantage. If the Tsar wished to talk to all his subjects, he would have to speak forty different languages or dialects. This being so, we can quite easily believe that both Napoleon and Tour-genieff were right; that Russia's cultivated people are few in number, and that her veneer of western civilization is still thin ; but give her as much time as older and more favored nations have enjoyed for their development, and possibly Russia may surpass them. Certain it is that in diplomacy, even now, she is a match for the rest of Europe. She holds a powerful position in the East. Her Trans-Siberian railroad almost touches the Pacific. She gains from China what she has so long desired, - an open, fortified harbor on her eastern coast. She has, moreover, boldly advanced to the Gates of India; and on the Bosphorus (no doubt, in payment for concessions made by the Sultan), has said to England " No," and England dared not move to the assistance of Armenia. As for the west of Europe, by her consummate coquetry with France, she has acquired a powerful ally, without, however, promising to do for France what France would certainly perform for her.

The Tsarina.

The Tsar.

The Northern Capital.

If this mighty empire shall continue for a generation longer to be guided thus, it will unquestionably become one of the most powerful factors in the world's development.

It is a memorable moment in the traveler's life when he beholds, rising before him, like some strange exhalation from the deep, St. Petersburg, the city of the Tsars. A dome, radiant with gold, shines through the mists of morning, like the sun emerging from the sea. "That," he exclaims, "must be St. Isaac's!" But, at the same moment, he asks himself in great astonishment, "Why was a capital ever built in such a place as this, almost within the Arctic Circle, and scarcely above the level of the sea?" Its very name suggests the answer, for it is named after its creator Peter the Great who, bursting through the barriers that bound him to the Orient, selected this strange site, that he might possess a window, as he called it, through which to look out upon civilized Europe. Yet, of all localities in which to found a capital, this was the most extraordinary. True, it is the point where the majestic river Neva pours its blue waters into the Gulf of Finland; but what a shore! A miserable marsh, half under water, without stones, clay, wood, or building material of any kind, - such was the spot on which this mighty capital was to be reared. The only persons found here were a few solitary fishermen, struggling for bare subsistence, in a place so little known as to be nameless. These peasants pointed out to Peter an old tree, on which a mark gave warning of the perilous height to which the waves would sometimes rise. Peter replied by ordering them to cut the old tree down.

The Approach To St. Petersburg.