Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/165

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THE RIVALRY OF EMPIRES
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on the Transiberian line, appears a less foolhardy enterprise when seen in the light of these realities.

This definition of the real Russia gives a new meaning not only to the Russia but also to the Europe of the nineteenth century. Let us consider that Europe, with the help of the map. All the more northern regions of Scandinavia, Finland, and Russia, and also East Russia southward to the Caucasus, are excluded as being mere vacancies, and with them the Turkish dominion in the Balkan Peninsula. It will be remembered that Kinglake in Eöthen, writing in 1844, considered that he was entering the East when he was ferried across the river Save to Belgrade. The boundary between the Austrian and Turkish Empires as settled by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, was not varied until 1878. Thus the real Europe, the Europe of the European peoples, the Europe which, with its overseas Colonies, is Christendom, was a perfectly definite social conception; its landward boundary ran straight from Petrograd to Kazan, and then along a curved line from Kazan by the Volga and Don Rivers to the Black Sea, and by the Turkish frontier to near the head of the Adriatic. At the one end of this Europe is Cape St. Vincent stand-