Every corps has three divisions, each division two brigades, cach brigade two regiments, and each regiment six battalions of 1000 men each: four of these last only take the field, the other two acting as reserves. The total active army, therefore, amounts to 360,000 men and 720 field pieces. Besides which, there are the guards in three divisions of infantry, one of artillery, and three more of cavalry; the grenadier corps, equal in strength to one of infantry; large reserves of mounted dragoons; and the independent regiments of Caucasus and Siberia. The entire peace establishment of the regular army, therefore, amounts to above 600,000 men, equivalent to one per cent. on the European population. The fleet comprises altogether 367 large and small ships of war, carrying 7,500 guns; including 48 ships of the line of from 110 to 74 guns, 39 frigates of from 64 to 44 guns, 94 corvettes, schooners, brigs, and cutters, 60 luggers and floating batteries, 15 war steamers, and 121 gunboats. These all tell well upon paper; but no nation can ever become an important maritime power without possessing a large commercial marine, in which a class of able-bodied and skilful seamen may be formed from their boyhood. Russia, with all her forces afloat, is at present like the genius of the Oriental tale, potent enough if once let out, but at the same time in reality locked up for all useful intents and purposes. The two keys of the coffer in which she is contained are the Sound and the Dardanelles. Her military colonies are principally in the south, and will render her frontiers impregnable on that quarter; but with regard to the effective force, which can ever be brought to act on the offensive, we conceive that no fears need be entertained with regard to ourselves. To act even offensively in confederacy with the other powers of Europe, she must be subsidized. Her credit has improved during the last eight or ten years; nor have her frequent loans, her failures in the Euxine, or the disasters in Circassia, at all impaired it. Her national debts are from £40,000,000 to £50,000,000 sterling, inclusive of some terminable annuities; as to the whole of which amount, the interest and sinking fund require about £3,000,000 per annum. Her entire imperial revenues, exclusive of Poland, would appear to reach at least £18,000,000 a yearsufficient for all necessary disbursements, when no foreign wars are being carried on. The gold-mines are supposed to be making considerable returns; but trade and commerce are doubtless doing much more. Hemp, flax, sailcloth, and cordage, form a fifth of the exports from Petersburg and Riga. Vineyards are on the increase, southward; and in 1835, the estimate of native wines was no less than 5,400,000 gallons. The tallow-trade renders grazing and cattle objects of great attention; and for the woollen exports, the Baltic sheep-walks, as well as those in VOL. X. 3 E south and west Russia, are said to have undergone no slight improvement. The forests cover 486,000,000 acres of ground, of which 326,000,000 are crown property,-notwithstanding, too, that vast injury has been inflicted upon many of them through immoderate or injudicious cutting. The average export of timber may be stated at £400,000 per annum, of which at least a moiety comes to ourselves. Manufacturing skill is in its transitionary state, perhaps requiring factitious protection, until the different products attain greater excellence. The number of manufactories has augmented prodigiously, from 2270 in 1801, to 3724 in 1820, to 6450 in 1837, and to 6855 in 1838, employing 412,931 masters and workmen. Of these establishments 606 were for woollen goods, 227 for silks, 446 for weaving, 1918 for leather-dressing, 444 for candle-making, 486 for metallic hardware, and the rest for saltpetre, sugar, potash, chemical, color, tobacco, and paper works. The internal trade circulates through the means of such busy and crowded fairs as are held at Novogorod, whither goods are often brought to the value of nearly £8,000,000, of which at least one-tenth comes from China! The five other fairs of Korennaja, Irbit, Rostow, Kretchensk, and Romny, in the governments respectively of Kursk, Perm, Poltawa, and Jakutzk, presented wares, taken altogether, in 1838, to the estimated amount of £2,500,000. The total of Russian imports from foreign countries for 1838 came to something under £11,000,000, of which one-twelfth came by land; one-fourth consisted of consumables, one-half was for the use of manufactories, and one-fourth was manufactured goods. The gross exports for the year 1838 came to nearly £14,000,000, of which a fifth passes through Riga, a tenth through Odessa, a twentieth through Archangel and Taganrog. As to Foreign Policy, the able diplomacy of the cabinet at St. Petersburg has grown into a proverb all over Europe. It cannot be reproached with losing by the pen what was won 'with the sword.' Scions of the aristocracy must consult national and not class interests there, or else they quickly find their way to the snows and wildernesses of Siberia. 'Nature herself seems to have traced the boundaries of a stupendous empire within the Baltic, the Icy Sea, the Ural Mountains, the Caspian, the Caucasian range, the Black Sea, and the Carpathians: in the west alone she left it open for the arms and policy of nations to diminish or increase its extent: for Siberia Proper can only be regarded as a wide and waste court-yard attached to the main edifice of the Russian state: but southern Siberia is capable of improvement, and will probably serve as a base of operations from whence European culture may penetrate into central Asia, which, though now benumbed, is not hopelessly dead. When the Russian power reached the gates sion, death, emigration, and exile, had destroyed 20,000 during the civil war of 1829-31; but the deficiency is said to have been fully made up, and its population now reaches 140,000. Riga has increased within the last thirty years more than a hundred per cent., having risen from 30,000 to 64,000. Odessa, scarcely half a century old, having only been founded in 1796, contains about 70,000 souls. Kazan, five versts from the Wolga, with its stone fort, wooden town, and Tartar suburbs, just maintains its celebrated leather manufactures, as also its Asiatic character of immobility; the inhabitants continue to be, what they have long been, about 50,000. After these come only five other towns, which contain between 50,000 and 30,000, namely, Kiow (the birthplace of the Russian state), Cronstadt, Astrachan, Tula, and Kaluga. There are some insulated large villages in the centre of European Russia, as there are in Hungary; but, belonging to the lords of the soil, they are prevented from becoming civil municipalities. One of these is the village of Iwanovo, in the government of Moscow, which is the property of a family named Schrematjew, and has a population of 48,000 souls.' -p. 170. There are various peculiarities which it is important to notice, with regard to the entire Russian population, lest the substantial strength of the empire should be overestimated on the one hand, or underrated on the other. The Sclavonians include four-fifths of the whole, being at least 50,000,000, which relieves the central government from all permanent apprehensions with regard to the lesser tribes and nations, which, through their want of connexion, can possess but little weight. It must not be forgotten, however, that Poland and Little Russia foster the most embittered hatred against Great Russia. The latter embraces indeed 36,000,000 souls, being three to one almost towards the former. The Lithuanians are about 2,000,000; the twelve Finnish tribes about 3,000,000; Mongolians, Caucasians, and Jews, make up the residue. These last may be put down at 1,500,000, on a moderate computation, possessing the right of settling only in the Polish and Caucasian provinces, and in the seventeen southern and western divisions, which constituted chiefly the kingdom of Poland before the partition. Every Israelite must now belong to some particular trade, or be treated as a vagabond. Nicholas has for some time past endeavored to encourage a taste for husbandry among them, by relieving farmers from the poll-tax for twenty-five years; and in cases where they form themselves into large agricultural villages, by excusing them from military service for fifty years. There are also other exemptions which they may claim under favorable circumstances. Merchants, handicraftsmen, and scholars, have enough. Sweden and Norway, Turkey and Persia, Central Asia, China, and Japan, are the geese to be plucked, one after the other, as the game goes on. It remains to be seen who will get the most feathers, make the best supper, and repose the most soundly afterwards. The press is issuing its paper missives, war is casting his largest cannon, steam is blowing up its preparatory fires, and ambassadors are sinking mines and countermines in every conceivable direction. The Ottoman power may probably be suffered, through the operation of various causes, to waste away in slow consumption: but the states of Middle Asia will have to undergo a struggle, at once violent, complex, and uncertain. Toryism, now once more at the helm of our own affairs, no doubt gloats over the anticipated result. A moral lift, as Canning used to say, may be given to that system which promotes strong government, at the expense of liberalism and democracy. Nevertheless we are slow to believe that what Tacitus said of the Romans shall ever be correctly applied to ourselves: ruitur omnibus in servitium! Our hopes predominate over our fears. In going over, once and again, the universal history of mankind,-in looking back upon past follies, and forward upon the glowing, though perhaps shadowy prospects ultimately opening over the world, we rest our hopes, under divine providence, upon the middle classes of this and other countries, who, armed with the power of knowledge, and held in check by their own interests, shall build up a glorious fabric amidst the overthrow of despotisms and aristocracies! And until that era arrives, the eloquent and imaginative author of Ion, one of the finest dramas of the age, has taught us what to guard against: "We must look within, For that which makes us slaves; on sympathies classification was not so much an organized distinction and distribution of parts, as a mere mechanical separation of them. His famous hierarchy constituted so many steps of stone to an inner sanctuary, where religion, or at least that which was so called, sat suffocated with ceremonial and pageantry at the feet of a barbarous czar, holding bribes in one hand, and the knout in the other. Even the hereditary nobility enjoyed no other real distinction than that of being oxen with larger horns and fatter sides than the rest of the vulgum pecus, chewing the cud, or lowing in most uncouth dignity around the throne of the Russian Polypheme! So many of its members became absorbed in official situations, and so many of its privileges extend to subordinate agents of the executive government, that there will never be a field of Runnymede within the vicinity of St. Petersburg. The rank of Burghers underwent some re-arrangement, but according to an entirely accidental and superficial scale, namely, that of fortune. In fact, civil position is settled upon military principles; nor can it be otherwise, where liberty and knowledge are substantially rare, if not altogether unknown. The sceptre of absolutism will never be aught else than a sword, either sheathed or naked. Millions of our fellow-creatures, scattered over the regions and steppes from Archangel to Astrachan, may be considered as so many armies in a sort of domesticated encampment, told off by divisions in an unchangeable order, and yielding blind obedience to their imperial commanderin-chief. Their present potentate maintains this idea in its severest rigor. His predecessor Peter borrowed for their use the intelligence of other lands; Nicholas, actuated by the same genius of autocracy, rather endeavors to develope to the uttermost that power of every various kind which he thinks his slaves have already acquired. Internal peril, however, perpetually appears to cross the spirit of his dream. The diadem was placed upon his brow amidst the tumults of metropolitan insurrection; and he must be dining every day of his life, like Damocles, with some weapon of destruction suspended over his head, too often by only a single horsehair. The employment of foreign masters or governesses in families is now prevented as much as possible; nor can even the nobility remain abroad more than five years-for which term of absence, moreover, they must have imperial permission. In 1840, a member of the Russian embassy at Rome was appointed inspector over all the artists of his country resident in that interesting capital. The eye of Muscovite espionage possesses even a sharper sight than that of the ancient Caledonians, or the celebrated man in the Mauritius! Nicholas is declared to have a strong will of his own, with a mind full of activity. Personal mobility is a necessary characteristic of his govern |