in the Baltic provinces; particularly and always and ever
poverty beyond description; poverty, disaster and conquest,
like triple demons to humiliate the soul of Russia and keep her
dumb for many centuries, except for the beauty of her unending
song.

And out of these conditions of life has grown the peace
morality that is native to the Russian people; out of their
sorrows and their conquered plains, out of their broken hearts
too, although the economic genesis of it all is very apparent.

The Russian people's Russia has ever been under the overlords
heel, downtrodden years without number, and yet it is a land
which has never produced a system of military tactics and
training--forever dependent for these creations upon her
neighbors; a land which has produced scarcely one great naval
or military commander who to-day holds a place in history as do
those of other nations; a land whose people have been usually
led to slaughter like sheep by Northman or Teutonic or Polish
generals; whose armies have never been noted for their great
campaigns, and always have been poorly drilled, managed and
fed, and never yet successful in any foreign wars. Surely from
such a land as this, no widespread war-morality or
world-conquering legions could come.

In fact the very reverse has come to pass: the philosophy of
Slavophilism has arisen in Muscovy, yet not so much arisen as
it has developed with the Russian soul, not as a thing apart,
but as a quality thereof, blossoming somehow with all other
Russian things, out of the primitive Scythian darkness. The