Far again to the east, Russia has added a large territory on the Chinese border on the river Amoor. ♦Extent and character of the Russian dominion.♦ All these conquests form the greatest continuous extent of territory by land which the world has ever seen, unless during the transient dominion of the old Mongols. No other European power in any age has, or could have had, such a continuous dominion, because no other European power has ever had the unknown barbarian world lying in the same way at its side. Nowhere again has any European power held a dominion so physically unbroken as that which stretches from the gulf of Riga to the gulf of Okhotsk. The greater part of the Asiatic dominion of Russia belongs to that part of Asia which has least likeness to Europe. It is only on the Frozen Ocean that we find a kind of mockery of inland seas, islands, and peninsulas. Massive unbroken extent by land is its leading character. And as this character extends to a large part of European Russia also, Russia is the only European land where there can be any doubt where Europe ends. The barbarian dominion of other European states, a dominion beyond the sea, has been a dominion of choice. The barbarian dominion of Russia in lands adjoining her European territory is a dominion forced on her by geographical necessity. The annexation of Kamtschatka became a question of time when the first successors of Ruric made their earliest advance towards the Finnish north.
♦Russian America.♦
Alongside of this continuous dominion in Europe and Asia, the Russian occupation of territory in a third continent, an occupation made by sea after the manner of other European powers, has not been lasting. The Russian territory in the north-west corner of America, the only part of the world where Russia and England marched on one another, has been sold to the United States.
♦Final Survey.♦
To return to Europe, the events of the nineteenth century have, in the lands with which we are dealing, carried on the work of the eighteenth by the further aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia. The Scandinavian powers have withdrawn into the two Scandinavian peninsulas and the adjoining islands, and in the southern peninsula the power of Denmark has been cut short to the gain of Prussia. The Prussian power meanwhile, formed in the eighteenth century by the union of the detached lands of Prussia and Brandenburg, has in the nineteenth grown into the imperial power of Germany, and has, even as a local kingdom, become, by the acquisition of Swedish Pomerania, Holstein, and Sleswick, the dominant power on the southern Baltic. The acquisition of the duchies too, not only of Sleswick and Holstein, but of Bremen and Verden also, as parts of the annexed kingdom of Hannover, have given her a part of the former oceanic position both of Denmark and Sweden. Russia has acquired the same position on the gulfs of the Baltic which Prussia has on the south coast of the Baltic itself. The acquisition of the new Poland has brought her frontier into the very midst of Europe; it has made her a neighbour, not merely of Prussia as such, but of Germany. The third sharer in the partition has drawn back from her northern advance, but she has increased her scrap of Russia, her scrap of Little Poland, her scrap of Moldavia,[78] by the suppression of a free city. The southern advance of Russia on European ground has been during this century an advance less of territory than of influence. The frontier of 1878 is the restored frontier of 1812. It is in the lands out of Europe that Russia has in the meanwhile advanced by strides which look startling on the map, but which in truth spring naturally from the geographical position of the one modern European power which cannot help being Asiatic as well.
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE SPANISH PENINSULA AND ITS COLONIES.
♦Analogy between Spain and Scandinavia.♦