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and among the ancestors of the Great Russians on the other side."
The Ukrainians, in distinguishing themselves from all their neighbours, established on their vast territory an almost absolute ethnic unity, and such a distinction makes itself felt even on the outskirts of the north of the country and in the region of the Carpathians.
This remarkable unity is explained by the displacements which several conquests effected in the different regions of the territory, when the Ukrainians ebbed and flowed back under the pressure of the invaders, nomadic tribes and others. The Ukrainians of these different regions thus met each other, harmonised together and formed a single ethnic type.
CHAPTER II.
THE NATIONAL CULTURE.
All that we have said with regard to the ethnology of the Ukrainian people shows they are a people possessed of a many-sided individuality. If up to now it has been ignored in the West, it is because people there have been living under the somewhat hypnotic influence of the Russian Empire. European thought has been accustomed to bow unquestionably to the suggestions and official tradition of Moscow and Petrograd. Now, the Ukrainians have the very legitimate pretension to present things as they really are.
Without doubt, the civilisation of the élite, thanks to the more favourable conditions, has realised during a century much more progress in Russia than in Ukraine, but also, without any doubt, the organic civilisation of the people themselves, the ethnological culture. Is much more advanced In Ukraine than in Russia. Whilst Moscovia, dwelling outside all civilising Influence for centuries, submitted to the sole influence of the Tartars, the Ukraine preserved Its relations with the civilised world: it was impressed by Byzantium, and then by all the Western civilisa-
