That Russia should have taken so long to assimilate herself in this respect to Western Europe is to be explained by the geographical and political conditions.  Her population was not hemmed in by natural or artificial frontiers strong enough to restrain their expansive tendencies.  To the north, the east, and the southeast there was a boundless expanse of fertile, uncultivated land, offering a tempting field for emigration; and the peasantry have ever shown themselves ready to take advantage of their opportunities.  Instead of improving their primitive system of agriculture, which requires an enormous area and rapidly exhausts the soil, they have always found it easier and more profitable to emigrate and take possession of the virgin land beyond.  Thus the territory—­sometimes with the aid of, and sometimes in spite of, the Government—­has constantly expanded, and has already reached the Polar Ocean, the Pacific, and the northern offshoots of the Himalayas.  The little district around the sources of the Dnieper has grown into a mighty empire, comprising one-seventh of the land surface of the globe.  Prolific as the Russian race is, its power of reproduction could not keep pace with its territorial expansion, and consequently the country is still very thinly peopled.  According to the latest census (1897) in the whole empire there are under 130 millions of inhabitants, and the average density of population is only about fifteen to the English square mile.  Even the most densely populated provinces, including Moscow with its 988,610 inhabitants, cannot show more than 189 to the English square mile, whereas England has about 400.  A people that has such an abundance of land, and can support itself by agriculture, is not naturally disposed to devote itself to industry, or to congregate in large cities.

For many generations there were other powerful influences working in the same direction.  Of these the most important was serfage, which was not abolished till 1861.  That institution, and the administrative system of which it formed an essential part, tended to prevent the growth of the towns by hemming the natural movements of the population.  Peasants, for example, who learned trades, and who ought to have drifted naturally into the burgher class, were mostly retained by the master on his estate, where artisans of all sorts were daily wanted, and the few who were sent to seek work in the towns were not allowed to settle there permanently.

Thus the insignificance of the Russian towns is to be attributed mainly to two causes.  The abundance of land tended to prevent the development of industry, and the little industry which did exist was prevented by serfage from collecting in the towns.  But this explanation is evidently incomplete.  The same causes existed during the Middle Ages in Central Europe, and yet, in spite of them, flourishing cities grew up and played an important part in the social and political history of Germany.  In these cities collected traders and artisans, forming a distinct social class, distinguished from the nobles on the one hand, and the surrounding peasantry on the other, by peculiar occupations, peculiar aims, peculiar intellectual physiognomy, and peculiar moral conceptions.  Why did these important towns and this burgher class not likewise come into existence in Russia, in spite of the two preventive causes above mentioned?