_Finland: Its Public and Private Economy_, by N. C. FREDERIKSEN, 1902, 306 pp.
While Germany and France were forced into the adoption of forest policies through necessity, after the natural woods had been largely destroyed or devastated, Russia started upon a conservative forest management, long before the day of absolute necessity seemed to have arrived.
Indeed, even to-day Russia is one of the largest and increasingly growing exporter of forest products in the world, its annual export having grown in the five years, 1903 to 1908, from 4 to 6 million tons and from 35 to 62 million dollars. A vast territory of untouched woods is still at her command, representing roughly two-thirds of the forest area of Europe.
The vast empire, second only to the British empire in extent, gradually acquired since the 15th century, occupies in Europe (including Finland) somewhat over 2 million square miles with over 120 million inhabitants, and in Asia somewhat over 6.5 million square miles, with only 30 to 40 million people.
Until 1906, when as a result of a revolution, a kind of representative government was secured, the hereditary Czar was ostensibly and by title an autocrat, governing with the assistance of four great councils and 12 ministers, but in reality the government was in the hands of a bureaucracy and court cabal, to a large extent corrupt, and hence the many good laws and institutions of which we read, may not always be found executed in practice as intended.
The European section of the country is divided into 98 governments or provinces, each under a governor, who is, however, largely dependent on the central power. The large territory of Siberia is divided into three governor-generalships, much of it, as well as of the other Asiatic provinces, is still unorganized, undeveloped and unexplored, or at least little known. Originally used mainly as a penal colony for criminal and political exiles, since the completion of the great Trans-Siberian railway, the country has been peopled by Russian farmers.
Both European Russia and Siberia are in the main vast plains, the former sloping northwestward from the Ural mountains in the East and from the Caucasus in the South, and the latter from the Altai, Lyan and Yabloni mountains north to the Arctic Ocean. Both sections exhibit in the southern ranges the effect of continental climates, prairie and plains country: the steppe; and in its northern ranges the effect of an arctic climate, short hot summers and long, severe winters: tundra and swamps.