THE ORIENTAL HERALD. THE NATURAL RESOURCES, COMMERCE AND MILITARY ORGANIZATION OF RUSSIA. We have assumed two positions. The one, that Russia is the representative of a profound theory of despotism; the other, that she seeks to pursue her conquests to the limits of the world. Independently of the fact of her present demonstrations on our Indian frontier, we have asserted the opinion that it is for Great Britain in the name of the universal liberties of nations to oppose her progress, to cut short her triumphal march, and to repel the wave of her insolent and encroaching advances even to the boundaries of her natural and savage confines. Mankind should never allow themselves to sink in oblivion to the axiom, that it is the political circumstances of to-day that superinduce the political contingencies of to-morrow; that it is the present which contains the mould of the future; that the existing freedom of countries is the donation of by-gone patriotism. The civilization of Europe at the present hour is beyond a doubt attributable to the apostles of genius and human greatness of the fifteenth century. What in commerce, in art, in learning, or luxuries, she is at the existing period, she is not through the agency of any living law, but through the vitality of the institutions of the past. As in the other important relations of the social element, so in politics, a single political reality floats on through centuries; one empire subverted or newly raised changes the condition of the world. The history of sieges and of the triumphs and defeats of armies is momentous, not from any barren recitals of slaughter and devastation, but from the principle of modification to the destinies of nations at large contained in each individual result. In a state of things wherein forms are eternally fluctuating, it is for the statesman to watch "If," says Gibbon, "a line of separation were drawn between the civilized and the savage climates of the world; between the inhabitants of cities, who culti vated the earth, and the hunters and shepherds who dwelt in tents; Attila might aspire to the title of supreme and sole monarch of the barbarians towards the east : it is difficult to circumscribe the dominion of Attila over the Scythian deserts; yet we may be assured, that he reigned on the banks of the Volga"! "In all their invasions," proceeds the same authority, "of the civilized empires of the south, the Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actuated by a savage and destructive spirit." Oriental Herald.-Vol. 3.-No. XIII. B |