Now the conditions of life at the circumference are unlike those at the centre ; the acceptable social organisation at St. Petersburg is not the same as that at Samarcand or Irkutsk. Sacred as are the old traditions now, for the period of expansion is short, it seems that they must be inevitably weakened by time and distance. Even now one may note, because this addresses the eye, that in the new cities men show less than in the old of fetish worship for the religious thing or priest ; there is less genuflexion, bowing, and crossing, but not less of morality in practical life. In Russia, the Church, with all its forms, is part of the form of the State. He who finds himself unconsciously drifting from the one set of forms is also departing from the other. If the existing political body is unfit for the development of a great people, we may feel that in the ceaseless extension of its frontier the aristocracy is preparing conditions which shall operate to peacefully modify those institutions which are inconsistent with reasonable individual liberty. Powerful as will be this retroaction from circumference back to centre, it will not, I surmise, be of the violent character which may be expected in the centre itself. For these colonisations which have carried the Czar's flag so far, are made by men of old patriarchal customs.
The father has himself a highly centralised authority ; he teaches and would enforce the tradition of loyalty to the Czar. Generations must pass before you could make a radical of him. Indeed he might be expected to indefinitely propagate Czar-worshippers if it were not that the frontier ceases to be frontier. It has its big towns, in time ; and a
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