loyalty to God and to the Czar—so long as the government continues to give them their land free, and attempts to exact no other tax from them than their military service, which they now render because it is a tradition among them.
The Cossacks are to-day as much of an unconquered people as the tribes of the Caucasus—or of Central Africa. But they are not of the same aggressive character as the other Caucasus people. They must be conquered by diplomacy. The Cossacks will not submit easily to a yoke, and not at all to a yoke which gives them no interest or occupation in life. To-day Cossack towns have neither mills nor factories. They are purely rural communities. They cannot subsist on this alone, and the young Cossacks who are ready for military service will not readily change their outlook and take up the peaceful pursuits of the farm. The wandering spirit is in his blood as much as in the blood of the gipsies. Yet he is so purely a survival of the past, maintained until the present time by so absolutely an unnatural system and combination of circumstances, that the continuance of his existence is unthinkable.
My observations would indicate that the Cossacks have all the elements of a strong and wholesome people. Their cruelty is the result of generations of encouragement, on the part of the Russian government. In one city, at the time of the barricades, a fear-crazed mob rushed forward with bared breasts, yelling, “Here we are! Strike us down!” and the Cossacks made answer, “Why do you taunt us? We also are men!” and rode past them without cutting down a single man.
The Caucasus Cossacks, I found, were not only men of manly feelings, but of exceptional physique. Surely they will lend themselves to civilization. Their land cannot be taken from them without a struggle. Submit to the regulations of civilized people immediately they never will. The problem is one that Russia’s next régime will have to work out. But the organization of the Cossacks, as perpetuated down to the present time, is without doubt one of the shrewdest and strongest pieces of interior administration ever adopted by a nation. If Russia were not torn from every center in the empire, the Cossacks would maintain peace indefinitely. Without the Cossacks, Russia, long ago, would have been overwhelmed. The Cossacks are the only branch of the army that can be relied upon absolutely, and they because they are now in possession of everything that the revolutionists are clamoring for. Freedom, liberty—all the shibboleths of revolutionism—are commonplaces in the life of the Cossacks. And when the time comes for this medieval institution to go under, it cannot be hoped that it will surrender without a struggle. So long as the House of Romanoff holds supremacy—and autocracy—the Cossacks will continue to flourish. If this régime is overthrown the next will have the Cossacks to cope with. The Cossacks will die hard. But die they must—or at least the institution of Cossackdom—and the Cossack must be saved to lend stamina and strength to the up-building of a strong state in Russia, whether constitutional monarchy or republic, and the individual Cossack turned into paths of productive labor.
During the two following days I passed through countless villages of the various tribes of the north Caucasus, and if this preliminary excursion did nothing more it, at least, disclosed to me the tremendous difficulties of civil administration in this wild region, and above all else the utterly blind, fanatical policies that have been pursued by the Russian government during the last twenty-five
A Cossack village—Province of the Don
