Now let us pass on to Russia, and see what a foreign country it is compared with our own. A hundred years ago, Russia extended from Kiev to the island of St. Lawrence, from the great Ural Mountains to the Gulf of Yenisei, and possibly those are in the right who think that it was with a view to setting a bound to her extension that Behring discovered the Straits which bear his name.
Russia was not to be kept back and has not stopped there--she has broken her ancient limit of Kiev. The Scandinavian serpent which enfolded two-thirds of the globe has expanded: it has opened its jaws to devour Prussia;--in the West, its jaws touch the Vistula on the one side, and on the other the Gulf of Bothnia. In the East, in one of its worm-like expansions, it has leapt across the Behring Straits and has come to a full stop only upon meeting the domains of England. Divided from the other extremity of the world, at the foot of Mt. Saint-Elias and the Blackburn Mountains, as though a barrier mounted up behind it, it bears sway to-day over the whole of that indented coast-line which, by way of an ultimate limit to the surface of the globe, fringes the Arctic Ocean from the Piasina river to the Bear Isles; from Lake Piasina to Holy Cape. Thus, in a century, Russia has acquired Finland, Abo, Viborg, Esthonia, Livonia, Riga, Reval and a part of Lapland from Sweden;--Kurland and Samogitia from Germany;--Lithuania, Volhynia, a part of Galicia, Mohileff, Vitebsk, Polotsk, Minsk, Bialystok, Kamenetz, Tarnopol, Vilna, Grodno, Warsaw, from Poland;--part of Little Tartary, the Crimea, Bessarabia, the coast of the Black Sea, the protectorate of Servia, of Moldavia and of Wallachia, from Turkey;--Georgia, Tiflis, Erivan and a part of Circassia from Persia;--the Aleutian Isles and the north-west part of the northern continent from the St. Lawrence archipelago, from America. From the other side of the Black Sea, she watches Turkey, whom she is ever ready to invade, as soon as France and England permit her. Then if, as seems probable, she some day annexes Sweden, she can close the Straits of Sund on the west and the Dardanelles on the east, and no one can then enter without her leave the Black Sea or the Baltic, those two great mirrors in which are reflected already the towers of Odessa and of St. Petersburg. Her greatest length extends 3800 leagues, and her greatest width is 1400 leagues. In all that extent of territory she has not one inch of land once ours. She has 70,000,000 inhabitants and not one single soul ever belonged to us.