The doctrine of the hereditary descent of the governing power was the cause of nearly all these conflicts.  A semi-idiot or a brutal ruffian was thus often found the ruler of millions of energetic men.  War and bloodshed were, of course, the inevitable result.  This absurdity was, perhaps, a necessary consequence of the ignorance and brutality of the times.  But happy is that nation which is sufficiently enlightened to choose its own magistrates and to appreciate the sanctity of the ballot-box.  The history of the United States thus far, with its elective administrations, is a marvel of tranquillity, prosperity and joy, as it is recorded amidst the bloody pages of this world’s annals.

According to the ancient custom of Russia, the right of succession transferred the crown, not to the oldest son, but to the brother or the most aged member belonging to the family connections of the deceased prince.  The energetic Monomaque violated this law by transferring the crown to his son, when, by custom, it should have passed to the prince of Tchernigof.  Hence, for ages, there was implacable hatred between these two houses, and Russia was crimsoned with the blood of a hundred battle-fields.

Nearly all the commerce of Russia, at this time, was carried on between Kief and Constantinople by barges traversing the Dnieper and the Black Sea.  These barges went strongly armed as a protection against the barbarians who crowded the banks of the river.  The stream, being thus the great thoroughfare of commerce, received the popular name of The Road to Greece.  The Russians exported rich furs in exchange for the cloths and spices of the East.  As the Russian power extended toward the rising sun, the Volga and the Caspian Sea became the highways of a prosperous, though an interrupted, commerce.  It makes the soul melancholy to reflect upon these long, long ages of rapine, destruction and woe.  But for this, had man been true to himself, the whole of Russia might now have been almost a garden of Eden, with every marsh drained, every stream bridged, every field waving with luxuriance, every deformity changed into an object of beauty, with roads and canals intersecting every mile of its territory, with gorgeous cities embellishing the rivers’ banks and the mountain sides, and cottages smiling upon every plain.  Man has no foe to his happiness so virulent and deadly as his brother man.  The heaviest curse is human depravity.

We now approach, in the early part of the thirteenth century, one of the most extraordinary events which has occurred in the history of man:  the sweep of Tartar hordes over all of northern Asia and Europe, under their indomitable leader, Genghis Khan.