Russia and the Russians
Description:... Russia, in the popular yiew of it, is regarded as a far-away country of but remote interest for all save a few of the western nations with whom it maintains more or less close political relations. We ourselves are apt to think of it, when we give it a thought, in terms of one or other of those conventional judgments which the world at large passes upon communities that from time to time compel its attention, but which it never thoroughly understands. Nor does travel always enlighten us as to the value for our culture processes of a knowledge of this long isolated empire in the European northeast. Extend our journey through Russia as we will, we seem ever to find ourselves in few and poorly developed urban communities, with their increasing proletariat, where poverty, intemperance, and sanitary neglect go hand in hand, and where the distance between the impecunious classes and the rich seems to grow greater year by year; in an empire of peasants where the land yields but a sorry subsistence to the people who cultivate it, -- people in whose minds superstition has more or less usurped the place left vacant by education -- and amid a general population of over a hundred million souls who continue to be held by a church-supported autocracy in a condition of political serfdom. - p. 1-2.
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