for centuries in conflict with one another, until the former and higher system ultimately prevailed. The attainment of this has no doubt been aided by the more peaceable character which the Tartars have been assuming as time goes on, coupled with a gradual tendency on their part to abandon nomadic for sedentary life, through contact with the settled Russian population, and through the gradual contraction of the grazing areas. But the population of the southern steppes of Siberia, being more suited to nomadic than to sedentary life, has naturally been slow to settle down under Russian influence.
So this early Slavonic civilization gradually moved across Central Asia, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the complete subjugation of the Tartars in the southern steppes can only be said to be a comparatively recent accomplishment. For as in the history of European Russia, so in that of Siberia and Central Asia, the Russians were compelled in self-defence to adopt the policy of gradual expansion, across the steppes in order to secure their own safety from Tartar raids, until some natural or strong political boundary mad farther advance unnecessary.
The Southern Siberian steppes, which imperceptibly merged into the steppes of Turkestan, possessed no such natural boundary behind which the Tartars could be driven and kept. The conquest of the Turkestan steppes during the latter half of the nineteenth century was therefore only the consummation of the process which had been going on in South-East European Russia and South-Western Siberia during the previous century. Southward the Russian frontier has in recent times been pushed up to
