CHAPTER XVI.
FOREIGN COLONISTS ON THE STEPPE The Steppe--Variety of Races, Languages, and Religions--The German Colonists--In What Sense the Russians are an Imitative People--The Mennonites--Climate and Arboriculture--Bulgarian Colonists--Tartar-Speaking Greeks--Jewish Agriculturists--Russification--A Circassian Scotchman--Numerical Strength of the Foreign Element.
In European Russia the struggle between agriculture and nomadic barbarism is now a thing of the past, and the fertile Steppe, which was for centuries a battle-ground of the Aryan and Turanian races, has been incorporated into the dominions of the Tsar.

The nomadic tribes have been partly driven out and partly pacified and parked in "reserves," and the territory which they so long and so stubbornly defended is now studded with peaceful villages and tilled by laborious agriculturists.
In traversing this region the ordinary tourist will find little to interest him.

He will see nothing which he can possibly dignify by the name of scenery, and he may journey on for many days without having any occasion to make an entry in his note-book.

If he should happen, however, to be an ethnologist and linguist, he may find occupation, for he will here meet with fragments of many different races and a variety of foreign tongues.
This ethnological variety is the result of a policy inaugurated by Catherine II.

So long as the southern frontier was pushed forward slowly, the acquired territory was regularly filled up by Russian peasants from the central provinces who were anxious to obtain more land and more liberty than they enjoyed in their native villages; but during "the glorious age of Catherine" the frontier was pushed forward so rapidly that the old method of spontaneous emigration no longer sufficed to people the annexed territory.