were induced to return to their native land by the liberal promises of Catherine II.; others have again come under Russian sway by the conquest of the countries in which they were settled. A number still remain on foreign soil; one at Gumbinnen, in Prussia; several in Bukovina, an Austrian province; others in European Turkey and Asia Minor. They have always held aloof from the people about them, and retained strong traces of their Muscovite nationality and origin. The safety they thus secured, and their liberation from Russian control, have proved of signal advantage to the Raskol, and enabled it to arrive subsequently at a regular and independent organization, such as, if kept totally within the empire, it never could have realized.
A complete and comprehensive system of organization for the Raskol, as a whole, in a religious sense, was rendered impossible by insuperable difficulties.
The absence of any well-defined theological creed or standard, the free exercise allowed to individual opinion, have given rise to innumerable sects. Upwards of two hundred were reckoned in the eighteenth century; many have disappeared, and are disappearing; more have arisen, and are constantly arising, harmonizing, like the denominations of Protestantism, to a certain extent, but without having a similarly stable, definite, and universally accepted basis of belief, and expressing every conceivable variety of doctrine.
As a social or political institution, in which the religious element enters to a large degree, the consolidation of the Raskol, accomplished with very considerable, if not entire, success, was facilitated by the peculiar spirit of association, and by the aptitude for self-government which are characteristics of the Russian people.
The leaders, succeeding to the inflammatory enthusi-
