Excerpt from The Cossacks: Their History and Country<br><br>Cossack inhabitants of the southern steppes was (as we shall later see) a long epic of heroic resistance to the encroachments of autocracy. If their distrust of the infinite docility of the moujik class has often made them in the past the blind instruments of reaction, their loyalty to Tsardom has never im plied any abdication of the privileges guaranteed their own caste.<br><br>While the organization of the present Cossack armies is the outcome of a system which may gen erally be termed democratic-feudalism I. E., a popular system of land tenure in return for military service to the Old re'gime their basic traditions were essentially free and republican. In spite of their old-time loyalty to the Tsar, the Cossack troops of the army and notably those about the imperial court were among the first to raise the standard of revolt during the constructive changes of March, 1917. The return of the Cossacks to the side of popular government was but the logical out come of the whole trend of their history.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.