Protestant missions, and does her best to advance her own church in every way. Nevertheless there does not seem to be either in the Caucasian countries or in the south and east of European Russia, where so many strange races live beneath the sceptre of the Czar, nearly so much bitterness of feeling among the subjects as there is towards ourselves in India, or to the French in Algiers now, and in the West Indies formerly. Perhaps this is partly because the Russians leave their subjects more to themselves, while we try to improve them: and the fact that in Georgia there is no distinction of faith or of colour between the two races has something to do with it. The Tatar Mohammedans, however, do not seem to have anything to complain of, either here or at Kazan on the Volga, where so many of them live, and one never hears that they are disaffected to the Czar, in spite of the long strife of the middle ages and the fanaticism of the Russian peasantry. So that, after all, there seems to be a good deal in the difference of manner with which we and they behave to inferior races. With us, every word and look betray a sense of immeasurable superiority. Sometimes we are brusque, sometimes we are politely condescending, but we are always at bottom contemptuous, and contempt makes deeper wounds than violence. In India and China the fault naturally reaches its climax, but the whole continent of Europe can hardly be wrong in accusing us of a milder form of it; indeed, every Englishman who is honest with himself must admit that whenever he travels in a foreign country, aye

even in France or Italy, he is conscious of some stirrings of this haughty insular spirit. The Spaniards are more offensive in this regard than ourselves; among the Romans there must have been plenty of it in their era of conquest; the Americans, with all their self-complacency, are comparatively free from it. But the Russians have really very little of it. Perhaps they would be stronger if they had more; but at any rate its absence largely covers or atones for some of their defects as a conquering and governing power.

The upshot of this digression is that Transcaucasia is on the whole a fairly contented and peaceable part of the Czar's dominions, and that this is due partly to the apathy of the Russians, partly to their goodnature, partly to their being in religious matters in sympathy with the faith of so large a part of their subjects. Last autumn, when war with Turkey was daily expected, no one seemed to have any fear of an insurrection even among the Lesghians, though it is only some twenty years since they used to swoop down from the mountains and carry off landowners from their country-houses a few stages out of Tiflis. Since Shamyl's surrender in 1859, there has been but one attempt at a rising in Daghestan, and that speedily ended by the head of the leader being sent by his own. people to the Russians at Tiflis. As I write these lines, news comes of a disturbance among the Mohammedan Tchetchens, who live to the north of the Caucasus, south-east of Vladikavkaz. It is hardly likely to prove serious; and the idea which some people in Europe seem to entertain of its spreading westward

to the Black Sea, where the Turks are said to have effected a landing, and of a general rising among the Caucasian tribes, is too wild to deserve refutation. The Circassians, whom the Turks are supposed to be endeavouring to excite, hardly exist in this country; they perished or emigrated in 1864; the Abhasians, who are left along the coast about Sukhum, are few and inert; the Imeritians, Mingrelians, and Gurians towards Batum, are Christians, a people not much inclined to fight for anybody, and certainly not against the Czar; among the remaining tribes there is no community in race, language, or religion which could enable them to co-operate were they ever so disaffected. The only thing that could make an insurrection among any of them dangerous to Russian movements would be a seizure of the Dariel military road, and of that there is no likelihood.

The same laws, the same mechanism of courts, the same educational system, omitting diversities of detail, obtain in these provinces as in European Russia. The great emancipation of the serfs, which here took place on the 1st of December, 1866, was carried out much upon the same lines as elsewhere; the peasantry of Georgia and Mingrelia, where serfdom prevailed from the middle ages downwards, are now all free, and the ancient, semi-feudal jurisdictions of the Mingrelian and Imeritian nobles have. been replaced by the new-modelled Russian courts. Practically, indeed, education is still more backward than it is in Europe. There are comparatively few elementary schools; the upper schools are said to

be poor, and are much hampered by difficulties of language, for the school-books in every subject are Russian, though Russian is a foreign tongue to the immense majority of the pupils. There is no university nearer than Kharkof or Odessa; the necessity for one in Tiflis is admitted, but the money is not forthcoming, since considerable salaries would be needed to tempt learned men so far from home, and all the money that can be got is wanted for the army and railways. Of literature, one of course expects to find very little, and except in the capital there is no public to care for it. Agriculture is much what it may have been five centuries ago, witness the implements used. The plough is a ruder contrivance than that which Hesiod describes; no wonder that a large team is needed to drag it through the hard dry earth. Just outside the houses of Tiflis I have seen no less than sixteen oxen yoked to a single plough. The want of a market discourages improvements in tillage, as well as trade generally, for although there is a railway to the Black Sea, with steamers thence to Odessa and Constantinople, as well as one or two great roads through the country, such as that to Erivan, there are no roads of the second order to bring produce to the railway from places lying even a few miles away. The manufactures, as already remarked, are mostly of what we should call Persian goods, or of arms, which the Georgians chase most tastefully, and other articles in metal, silver flagons, belts, daggers, and so forth. Things needed for ordinary life, such as cutlery, crockery, glass, paper, cotton goods, are mostly

brought from European Russia. What export trade there is and it is not, considering the resources to be drawn upon, of any great consequence-is mostly in carpets and silks, made in the Tatar country towards the Caspian or among the Persians of Lenkoran, naphtha from Baku, and woods, especially box-wood and walnut roots, from Mingrelia and the south-west slopes of the Caucasus. Nature has made the country rich, but the course of events has not brought to it that which a country needs to develop its riches, capital and enterprise. Both must come from without, and at present Russia can spare neither. Her capital is all wanted at home; her peasants, except some sects of dissenters who have been deported hither by the Czars, have not crossed the mountains to colonize, nor are they the sort of colonists that change the face of a country as Americans do. They are uneducated, attached to their old ways, unreceptive of new ideas even in a new land.

If it is hard to convey an impression of the general character of Transcaucasia, the reason possibly is that it has not one general character, but two or three. It is like a mixed tissue, whose colour seems to vary according as the light falls this way or that upon it. There is no place in Europe except Constantinople, and probably few places in the world, where one feels in the middle, so to speak, of so many cross-currents, so many diverse associations of the past and possibilities for the future. Perhaps this puzzling, pleasing complexity, creating a desire to predict as well as to explain, and a sense of the difficulty of prediction, is