in the principles underlying all human society.  No people has ever had a permanent government of its own resting solely or chiefly on force.  Wherever autocracy has acquired a firm footing, it has done so by suppressing anarchy, establishing order and authority, and securing national unity and independence.  Nowhere has it fulfilled these conditions more completely than in Russia.  It grew up when the country was lying prostrate under the Tartar domination, and it supplied the impulse and the means by which that yoke was thrown off.  It absorbed petty principalities, extinguished their conflicting ambitions, and consolidated their resources; checked the migrations of a nomad population, and brought discordant races under a common rule; repelled invasions to which, in its earlier disintegrated condition, the nation must have succumbed, and built up an empire hardly less remarkable for its cohesion and its strength than for the vastness of its territory.  In a word, it performed, more rapidly and thoroughly, the same work which was accomplished by monarchy between the eighth and the fifteenth century in Western Europe.  If its methods were more analogous to those of Eastern despotisms than of European sovereignties, if its excesses were unrestrained and its power uncurbed, this is only saying that Russia, instead of sharing in the heritage of Roman civilization and in the mutual intercourse and common discipline through which the Western communities were developed, was cut off from association with its more fortunate kindred and subjected to influences from which they were, for the most part, exempt.  To hold up the crude democracy and turbulent assemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that the Russian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifully organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or difficulty, the “method” being “really not of importance,”—­all this strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the eighteenth-century philosophes had not yet been dissipated by the French Revolution.

“A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago: 
  A Narrative of Travel and Exploration from 1878 to 1883.” 
  By Henry O. Forbes, F.R.G.S. 
  New York:  Harper & Brothers.