the country of the Don Cossacks possesses an especial claim upon our attention, for the soldiers which are levied from its boundless steppes occupy the most prominent position among Muscovite troops. So long as the independence of Turkey is menaced by its insatiate neighbour, associations of the deepest significance attach to those provinces bordering upon the Black Sea which Russia has appropriated to herself within the last sixty years, and which compose a territory as extensive as all that remains in Europe of the ill-fated empire from which they have been plundered.
But though the prominence of a topic so engrossing as Russian aggression, at the present crisis, lends an immediate interest to everything which seems to have reference to it, there can be no doubt that any information upon the internal economy of the Empire is deserving of more general attention than has been hitherto accorded to it, since its importance must increase with the growing influence of Russia over the rest of Europe. Yet, while strongly impressed that a desire for a more extended knowledge of the subject would produce most beneficial effects, I am fully conscious of my own inability to create it. This must be my excuse for not venturing more frequently beyond the simple course of my narrative.