The Russian road to China

THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY

HOW long to Irkutsk? Seven days now, seven years when last I came.” The bearded Russian standing in the doorway of the adjoining compartment in the corridor-car of the Siberian Express gazes thoughtfully at the fir-covered slope, whose dark green stands in sombre contrast to the winter snows. The train is slowly climbing the Ural Range, toward the granite pyramid near Zlatoust, on opposite sides of which are graven “Europe” and “Asia.” Neighbors with easy sociability are conversing along the wide corridors, exchanging stories and cigarettes, asking each other’s age and income in naïve Siberian style.

Regarding the burly occupant of the next stateroom one may discreetly speculate. From sable-lined paletot and massive gold chains you hazard that he voyaged with the traders’ slow caravans in the days before the railway—that he was a merchant.

“A merchant? Optovi? No, I did not come with the caravans.”

From the triangle of red lapel-ribbon, the rank-bestowing decoration, you venture a second guess.

“Perhaps the gaspadine made the great circuit to oversee the local administrations? He was a government inspector—Revizor?”

“Chinovnik niet navierno,” he answers. Most decidedly he was not an official. The suggestion causes him to smile broadly. “I was with the convicts,” he says.

Beside the line of rails curves the old post-road winding like a ribbon through the highlands.

“It was by that road we marched. Seven years of my life lie along it.”

The train swings through a cleft hewn in the living rock, steep-sided as if the mountain had been gashed with a mighty axe. It rumbles around the base of an overhanging crag while you look clear down over the white valley, with the miles of rolling green forest beyond.

“Was not seven years a long time for the march?” you venture.

“For a traveler, yes; for convict bands not unusual. We went back and forth, now northward a thousand versts as to Archangel, now west as to Moscow, now south as to Rostov. Again and again our troop would split, and part be sent another way. New prisoners would be added, from Warsaw, Finland, Samara. New guards would take charge. Some groups would go to the West Siberian stations, some east to the Pacific and Sakhalin. I, who was written down for ten years at the Petrovski Works beyond Baikal Lake, with a third commuted for good behavior, had finished my term before I got there.”

“Why did they wander so aimlessly?”

“It seems truly as a butterfly’s flight, but you others do not know the way of Russia. Very slowly, very deviously she goes, but surely, none the less, to her goal. We each came at last to our place.”

A match flares up and he lights another cigarette.

“Shall we not go to the ‘wagon restoran’ for a glass of tea?” you ask.

Along the broad aisles you walk, past the staterooms, filled with baggage, littered with bedding, kettles, novels, and fur overcoats. Everything is in direst confusion, and the owners are sandwiched precariously between their belongings. On the little tables which are raised between the seats, they are playing endless games of cards, sipping tea and nonchalantly smoking cigarettes the while. You pass the stove-niches at the car entrances, heaped to the ceiling with cut wood. The fire-tenders as you pass give the military salute. You cross the covered bridges between the cars, where are little mounds of the snow that has sifted in around the crevices; and a belt of cold air tells of the zero temperature outside. At length the double doors of the foremost car appear ahead, and crossing one more arctic zone over the couplings, you can hang your fur cap by the door and salute the ikon that with ever-burning lamp looks down over the parlor-car. Now you can sit on the broad sofa set along the wall, or doze in the corner-rocker under the bookcase, or sit tête-à-tête in armchairs over a miniature table. Ladies here, as well as men, are chatting, reading, and smoking, for this combination parlor, fumoir, and dining-room is for all, not a resort to which the masculine element shamefacedly steals for unshared indulgences.

“Dva stakan chai, pajolst” (two glasses of tea, please), your friend says to the aproned chelaviek, a Tatar from Kazan.

“Stakan vodka,” you add; for you are willing to contribute twenty kopecks to the government revenues if this beverage will help out the memoirs of your friend, the convict.

“Say chass,” replies the waiter, which means, literally, “this hour,” figuratively, “at once,” actually, whenever he chances to recall that your party wants a glass of tea and another of vodka. When at length the refreshments have come, your companion gets gradually back to the reminiscences.

“Were your comrades many on that march?”

“Twenty-six from my school in Odessa,” he says. He tells of the tumult in the Polytechnic Academy, when he was a boy of sixteen studying engineering; of the barricade which the students threw up; of the soldiers sent against it; of an officer wounded with a stone, and the sentence to the mines. He tells of the journey, day after day, the miserable company trudging under the burning suns of summer and shivering under the biting cold of winter, ill-fed and in rags. He recalls how this friend and that friend sickened and died; how a peasant-woman gave him a dried fish; how one of the criminals tried to escape and was lashed with the plet until he fainted beneath its strokes.

“We were a sad procession. First came the Cossacks on their ponies, with their carbines and sabres. Then the murderers for Sakhalin, and the dangerous criminals in fetters; a few women next; then we, the politicals; last, more soldiers marching behind. Far to the rear came carts and wagons with the wives and families of the prisoners, following their men into exile. Slowly we went, scarcely more than fifteen versts a day, with a rest one day out of three, for the women. In winter we camped in stations along the road.”

From the comfortable leather armchairs they seem infinitely distant and dream-like, these tales from the dark ages of Siberia. The speaker seems to have forgotten his auditor and to be talking to himself, and soon he relapses into silence. He sits holding his glass of lemon-garnished tea, like a resting giant with his shaggy beard and mighty chest. The drag of the brakes is felt through the train. “Desiet minute stoit” (ten minutes’ stop), somebody calls out. Suddenly, with an effort, the man across the table rouses from his reverie, and looks about the car, when the broad smile comes back and he says earnestly:—

“You must not think of that as the true Siberia. It was all long ago—thirty-five years. And you see I who became a kayoshnik, a gold-seeker, have prospered, and work many mines. I am glad now that they sent me to Siberia. And many others prosper who came with the convicts. The old dark Siberia dies, but our new Siberia of the railroad lives, and grows great.”

He rises resolutely and shakes your hand with a vise-like grip.

“De svidania!” (Till we meet again.)

You rise with the rest, draw on your fur cap and gloves, work into the heavy fur-lined overcoat, and clamber down to the platform. A little wooden station-house painted white is opposite the carriage door. It has projecting eaves and quaint many-paned windows. In front of it is a post with a large brazen bell. On the big signboard you can spell out from the Russian letters “Zlatoust.” This is the summit station of the pass that crosses the Urals. Around are standing stolid sheep-skinned figures, bearded peasants just in from their sledges, which are ranked outside the fence. Fur-capped mechanics, carrying wrenches and hammers, move from car to car to tighten bolts and test wheels for the long eastward pull. Uniformed station attendants are here and there, some with files of bills of lading. As you walk down the platform among the crowd, you come upon a soldier, duffle-coated and muffled in his capote, standing stoically with fixed bayonet. Forty paces further there is another, and beyond still another, all the length of the platform, and far up the line. What a symbol of Russian rule are these silent sentries! And what a mute tale is told in the necessity for a guard at every railroad halting-place in the Empire!

You stroll along toward the engine. Huge and box-like are the big steel cars, five of which compose the train. Two second-class wagons painted in mustard yellow are rearmost, then come the first-class, painted black, next the “wagon restoran” and the luggage-van, where the much advertised and little used bath-room and gymnasium are located. The engine is a big machine, but of low power, unable to make much speed; and the high grades and the road-bed, poor in many places, additionally limit progress. It is apparent why the train rarely moves at a rate greater than twenty miles an hour.

At first you do not notice the cold. But now that you have walked for a few minutes along the platform, it seems to gather itself for an attack, as if it had a personality. You draw erect with tense muscles, for the system sets itself instinctively on guard. The light breeze that stirs begins to smart and sting like lashes across the face. The hand drawn for a moment from the fleece-lined glove, stiffens into numbed uselessness. As you march rapidly up and down the platform, an involuntary shiver shakes you from head to foot. A fellow passenger, remarking it, observes:—

“It is not cold to-day, in fact, quite warm. Ochen jarko.”

You walk together to the big thermometer that hangs by the station-door. It is marked with the Réaumur Scale, and your brain is too torpid for multiplications. But the slightly built official, known as a government engineer by green-bordered uniform and crossed hammers on his cap, is inspecting the mercury also.

“Eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit,” he says. “Quite warm for January. It is often thirty-five degrees below zero here in the Uralsk.”

It gets colder at the suggestion. The three starting-bells ring, and everybody scrambles into the compartments.

The express rolls onward down the Urals. You stroll back to the warm dining-room and idly watch the groups around. Across the way is an elderly mild-looking officer, whose gold epaulettes, zig-zagged with silver furrows, are the insignia of a major-general. He smokes endless cigarettes in company with another officer lesser in degree, a major, decorated with the Russo-Japanese service-medal, smart of carriage and alert of look. By the window beyond is a young German, gazing meditatively at the hills and the snow through the bottom of a glass of Riga beer. A rather bright-mannered dame, with rings on her fingers and long pendants in her ears, chats vivaciously in French with a phlegmatic-looking personage in a tight-fitting blue coat which buttons up to his throat like a fencer’s jacket. A quietly-dressed gentleman, evidently in civil life, is reading one of the library copies of de Maupassant.

Outside, cut and tunnel, hill, slope, and valley, green forest, white drifted snow, and bare craggy rocks, the Urals glide past. The little track-wardens’ stations beside the way snap back as if jerked by a sudden hand, and the telegraph-poles catch up in endless monotony the sagging wires.

The Tatar waiter goes from place to place, clearing off the ashes and the glasses, and getting ready for dinner. There is a table-d’hôte repast, the Russian obeid, a meal which starts with a fiery vodka gulp any time after noon, and tails off in the falling shadows of the winter sunset with tea and cigarettes. Or, if one wishes, he may press the bell, labeled in the Græco-Slavonic lettering, “Buffet,” and dine à la carte.

“Il vaut mieux essayer le repas Russe,” says the quiet reader of de Maupassant, joining you.

He is duly thanked for the advice, and we beckon to the aproned waiter. At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten the cold zakuska of black rye-bread and butter, sardinka, salty beluga, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then comes in, after the omni-inclusive zakuska, a big pot of cabbage-soup which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream. The chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third course, which we garnish with mustard and taste.

“Voyons!” the Frenchman observes. “Of the Russian cuisine and its method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve. Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But contemplating the obeid as an institution so evolved as to fit into the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide to Russian character.”

“What signifies this mélange of raw fish, eggs, and great slices of flesh, and mush of cabbage-soup?”

“Not that the Russian has no taste. It is that he sacrifices his finer susceptibilities to his love of freedom. A regular hour for meals would seem to him a sacrifice of his leisure and convenience to that of the cook. The guiding principle of the national cuisine is that all dishes must be capable of being served at any time that the eater feels disposed.”

This is a problem to put to any kitchen, we allow. Napoleon’s chef met it by relays of roasting chickens. But one cannot keep half a dozen fowl going for each household of the one hundred and forty million inhabitants of Russia. Thus sturgeon is provided, and sterlet, parboiled so that it tastes like blotting-paper; and the filet that is called “biftek,” and the oil-sodden “Hamburger,” that is dubbed “filet.” These can be started at nine in the morning, and be removed at any time between that hour and nine at night, without any appreciable change in taste or texture. The cook of the restaurant, like his brethren of the Empire, has laid his professional conscience sacrificially upon the national altar of unfettered meals. If the obeid is not a triumph in culinary art, it is at least a signal example of domestic generalship.

We have advanced without a hitch to roast partridge, with sugared cranberries, which our friend washes down with good red wine from the Imperial Crimean estates. We get through a hard German-like apple-tart, and reach the last item of cheese.

When the mighty meal is over, we order tea, light cigarettes, and lean back in the armchairs to chat and note how our neighbors are getting through the time.

At the far end of the room a Russian has joined the French lady and her escort. They are celebrating some occasion that requires heaping bumpers of champagne. The babble of their conversation is in the air. It seems to refer to the comparative appreciation of histrionic talent in Rouen and Vladivostok!

Somebody is being treated to a dressing-down in the latest Parisian argot. “Ces sont des betteraves là-bas!” one hears scornfully above the murmurs.

Across the way some Germans are engaged with beer-schooners. One of them gets excited and brings his fist down upon the table. “Arbeit in Sibirien nimmer geendet ist; they always want more advice about their gas-plants.”

In the lull that follows the explosion, a gentle English voice floats past from the seat behind us. “And so I told him that the station had nearly enough funds, but we needed workers, more workers.” It is the English medical missionary on his way to Shanta-fu, discussing China with the American mining-engineer, bound for Nerchinsk.

The piano, under the corner ikon with its ever-burning lamp, tinkles out suddenly, and a man’s voice starts up—

He misses a note every now and then, which does not embarrass him in the least. Caroling gayly to his own accompaniment, he forges ahead. The crowd in the armchairs around the room, consuming weak tea or strong beer, and smoking, all join with an untroubled accord and versatile accents, French, English, and Russian, in the blaring chorus, “The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”

The train rocks faster on the falling grade; little by little the mountains drop away; gradually the mighty forests become dwarfed into scattered clumps of straggly birches, and the great trees dwindle into bushes; lower and still lower fall the hills, until all is flat. As far as the eye can see are the snow-covered wastes, treeless, houseless, lifeless. The lowest foothills of the Urals have been passed. It is the beginning of the great steppes.

Slowly the daylight wanes. The gray darkness deepens steadily; it seems to gather in over the gliding snow, and the peculiar gloom of a Siberian winter’s night closes down. At each track-guard’s post flash with vivid suddenness the little twinkling lanterns of the wardens of the road. Involuntarily conversation becomes less animated and voices are lowered; the spell of the sombreness is over all.

Soon the electric lamps are lighted, and from brazen ikon and sparkling glasses flash reflections of their glitter. Curtains are drawn, which shut out the enshrouding blackness. The piano begins tinkling again; the waiters come and go with tea and liqueurs; the babble of conversation rises; and the idle laughter is heard anew. Darkness may be ahead, behind, and beside, but within there is light—enjoy it.

The train slows for a halt. Station-lamps shine mistily through the brooding night. Lanterns bob to and fro on the platform as fur-capped train-hands pass, tapping wheels and opening journal-boxes. At each door a fire-tender is catching and stowing away the wood which a peasant in padded sheepskins is tossing up from his hand-sled below. It is Chelliabinsk, whose old importance as the clearing-house of the convicts has been passed on to the new city of the railroad. Here the just completed northern branch, linking Perm to Petersburg, meets the old southern line from Samara and Moscow.

A short stop and the train moves on again. The day is done and gradually each saunters into his own warm compartment, which the width of the Russian gauge makes as large as a real room. One can read at the table by the window, under the electric drop-light, or, propped in pillows, one can stretch out luxuriously on the easy couch that is nightly manoeuvred into an upper and lower berth. Practically always after crossing the Urals, the number of passengers has so thinned out that each may have a stateroom to himself.

Presently you push the bell labeled, “Konduktor.” A uniformed attendant appears standing at the salute. “Spate” (sleep) is sufficient direction. The sheets and pillows are dug out and the transformation of the couch into a bed is effected. “Spacoine notche” (good-night) he says, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic throb of the engine.

During the following hours the train enters the Tobolsk Government, the oldest province of Siberia, whose 439,859 square miles of area, nearly four times as large as Prussia, extend roughly from the railroad northward to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Urals eastward so as to include the lower basin of the Ob-Irtish river system. This ancient province has seen much of Siberia’s history, whose predominant features have been two, growth and graft.

Out of evil, somehow, in a marvelous way has been coming good. In the earliest days, with what smug satisfaction did the Stroganovs find that the native inhabitants would trade ermine for glass beads! Yet the fruit of their sharp dealing and purchased protection and special privilege was the expedition that won Sibir, founded Tobolsk, and opened to Russia the way into northern Asia. The imperial commissioner who came to Tobolsk shortly after Kutchum Khan’s overthrow, to collect the yassak tribute of ten sable-skins for each married man and five for each bachelor, was detected culling the choice skins for himself, and substituting cheap ones for his master. But his agents had sought out the paths and extended the Russian Empire far into the northern forests.

By despotic oppression the inhabitants of Uglitch town, condemned for testifying to the murder of Dimitri, the Czarevitch, came here into exile in 1593, carrying with them the tocsin-bell that had tolled alarm when the Czar wished silence. But they, together with the deported laborers settled by the same arbitrary will along the Tobol River, started the permanent settlement of the new realm.

A succeeding functionary called on the natives for a special tribute of ermine for the Czarina’s mantle. He collected so many bales of it that the taxed began to wonder at the stature of the “Little Mother,” and sent a special deputy to Petersburg. The legate discovered that the Empress was as other women, and on his disclosures the official was unable to save his own, let alone the ermines’ skins. Yet while the governor was plundering the fur-merchants of Tobolsk, the frontiers were extending, until by 1700 they reached eastward to Kamchatka and Lake Baikal, southeast to the Altai foothills at Kuznetz, and north to the Arctic Ocean.

At Tobolsk in 1710 Peter the Great established the capital of his reorganized province of Siberia. Prince Gagarin, whom he appointed its first governor, found here a systemless extortion unworthy of an efficient statesman. With the thoroughness of genius he built up in the unhappy province a regular organization of rascality. His pickets patrolled the roads into Russia, to prevent the escape of those who might carry the tale of his oppression. He arranged with high officials at Court that any petitioners who evaded this frontier net should be handed over to an appropriate committee. Thus fortified, he began collections of as much as could be wrung from his luckless subjects. Every traveler paid Gagarin’s tariff, every farmer sent him presents of stock, every trapper forwarded the best of his catch. The fur-trader’s donations and the merchants’ loans were assisted into Gagarin’s warehouses by thumbscrew and thonged knout.

While these things passed in Tobolsk there came periodically to Petersburg delegations of outwardly contented citizens attesting the wisdom of their governor. They brought to the Czar and the Grand Dukes, in addition to the punctiliously rendered tax yassak, gifts of especially fine furs. Such was the completeness of Gagarin’s control that not an echo of the true state of affairs reached the ears of the astute Peter.

At length, in 1719, Nesterov, the Minister of Finance, was privately approached by some Tobolsk merchants and was supplied with evidence sufficient to hang half the officials in Siberia. In a dramatic presentation the Minister furnished this to the Imperial Senate, showing so bad a case that Gagarin’s own agents in the ducal circle rose up against him. The Czar sent Licharev, a major of the Guard, to Siberia, to proclaim in every town and hamlet that Gagarin was a criminal in the eyes of the Emperor. As this messenger approached Tobolsk, official after official came out to turn state’s evidence, trying to assure his personal safety. The highways to Russia were guarded by Peter’s own troops, with orders to seize all outgoing travelers who might be transporting Gagarin’s accumulated spoil, which with commendable prudence the Czar had allocated to himself.

When Peter was in England he had remarked casually to an acquaintance, “In my realm I have only two lawyers, and one of these I intend to hang as soon as I get back.” It was particularly unfortunate for this ex-governor that the remainder of the legal profession did not feel himself called upon to explain to Peter the Gagarin campaign contributions. No one ever needed an attorney more. He was under trial before an imperial judge who did not know a technicality from a tort, and whose preliminary procedure was to order a reliable gallows.

For some score of years subsequent to Gagarin, the governors of Siberia were, in any event, moderate. The province grew apace, increased by exiles, by land-seeking colonists, by raskalniks,—nonconformists of the Greek Church, self-called “Old Believers,”—who preferred to come to Siberia rather than follow Peter’s orders and shave off their beards.

Then Chicherin the Magnificent came. His life was a round of celebrations. Wonderful stews he concocted for his sybaritic revels. At obeid an orchestra of thirty pieces supplied the music. Artillery in front of the residency saluted him with salvos when he drove out. In Butter-Week all Tobolsk drank the spirits which their governor bountifully provided. It is hardly necessary to say that the money for these entertainments did not come from Chicherin’s private purse: the city merchants groaned over forced loans and benevolences; and at last their cry reached the throne, and Chicherin too was removed.

With his passing, the Tobolsk Province fell to less spectacular rulers, but under good and bad it grew steadily, until in 1860 there were a million inhabitants within its borders, a population which at the present time has risen to a million and a half. Some forty thousand of these are exiles; some eighty thousand raskalniks; and forty thousand Tatars, who feed the flocks where their ancestors once bore sway, living peacefully side by side with the Russians. Some fifteen thousand are descendants of the Samoieds and Voguls with whom the first Stroganov from the adjoining Russian province of Archangel traded his wares. Some twenty thousand are Ostiaks whose forebears were alternately allies and enemies of Yermak.

The capital city, Tobolsk, on the Tobol River hard-by its junction with the Irtish, has grown from a precariously held camp of two hundred and fifty fugitive Cossack soldiers to a city of thirty thousand. Tiumen, the easterly city on the Tura River, another of Yermak’s camps, has grown into a great distributing-centre for produce brought by the river-highways. From the railway line northward as far as the city of Tobolsk extends a farm-belt, a continuation of the black-earth region of great Russia. The fertility of the land may be judged by the number of villages met as the train speeds on, and the large proportion of enclosed fields on both sides of the track. Some of the finest agricultural soil in the world lies here, such soil as composes the prairies of Minnesota and Dakota. Three million head of live stock graze in the district, which has a yearly production of ten million hundredweight of wheat alone, four million of rye, and nine million of oats. Five million more settlers may live and thrive, and the harvest will feed the ever-growing cities of Europe when Siberia comes to be the new granary of the old world. The stress and turmoil of Tobolsk are passed. Happy the people who have no annals!

Gradually, as the train rolls eastward beyond the Ishim River Valley, the farm country opens out into the unfenced prairie of the Great Steppe. The clustered wooden villages that flanked the line through Tobolsk appear less and less frequently, till at last we seem to glide over an immense white sea, frozen into perpetual calm and silence. Here and there a gray thicket of stunted trees and bushes, here and there a grove of naked-limbed birches, mutely exhibit Nature’s desolation.

As the sullen landscape bares itself, one thinks of the prison caravans tramping these wastes; of the early neglected garrisons which Elizabeth’s favorite General Kinderman proposed to victual on crushed birch-bark and relieve the Crown of their expense; of all the misery and the wrong that the steppes of Siberia have symbolized. No sign of man’s handiwork or of Nature’s kindliness is seen,—only the cold snow and the bare birches, while regularly as the ticking of a clock the telegraph-poles and the verst-spaced stations snap back into the wastes. The dominant reflection is not, how great is the achievement which has mastered these steppes! but, how infinitesimal is all that man has done in this ocean of untrodden snow! Hour after hour we are driving on. Yet never is there passed a landmark to conjure into imagination a picture of progress. One moves as in a nightmare, where he runs for seeming ages, hunted forward, yet can never stir from the spot. The horizon-bounded circle of vision is as the ever-receding rim of a giant dome, the rails ahead and behind bisecting its white immensity. Above, the vast bowl of the blue sky dips and meets it, imprisoning us. Where are the fields and villages; the bustling activity of human life that tells of man’s mastership? Hour after hour passes without a change in the drear monotony of the landscape; for miles on miles not a trace is seen of human dominion. Grim Nature spreading her shroud over plain and pasture is despot here, and Winter is ruler of the Siberian Steppe.

One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the “hunger steppe” to the borders of Turkestan, and find the same monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east to China, with each day’s march a counterpart of the rest. Five hundred thousand square miles of area are covered with grass and gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 104°. In winter snow is everywhere,—in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to forty degrees below zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts. Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people, and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over the tremendous range. As the herds have become hardened through the centuries and survive in measure despite the severity, so also have the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures buried in skins, who keep guard over them.

One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations,—flat faces, round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons of the Tatars, whose very name was distorted into that of a dweller in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become shopkeepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops, figures, gnome-like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the locomotive and passengers.

Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals over the mind—a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do as the Russians—pay no attention whatever to the landscape outside, but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary,—cards and cigarettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take days for the spinning.

The uniformed judge, passing by, joins you. He is traveling to a new appointment with his swarming family of children, shawl-decked females of unknown quality and quantity, the household bedding, and the ancestral samovar, all crowded into one stifling compartment. He discusses volubly the confusions of the Code, and propounds a unique theory of his own as to Russian jurisprudence, to the effect that all the best laws of other nations have been adopted, with none of the old or conflicting enactments repealed. The general drops into the circle. He is interesting when one has pierced the crust, but dogmatic. At every station the soldiers of the garrison, not on sentry-duty, jump to one side, swing half-around, and stand at the salute until he passes, to the huge inconvenience of the porters. He would undoubtedly vote the Democratic ticket to repay Mr. Roosevelt for putting Russia under the alternative of stopping the war perforce, or forfeiting sympathy, when Japan was said to be breaking under the strain.

“Russia was beaten this time. What of it? Nietchevo!” says the general.

“Nietchevo,” we echo, as we sip our tea.

“But the Japanese are wily insects,” observes his companion, the young service-medaled major. “I was in Vladivostok when our prisoners came back. They tried to get money for the checks the Japanese had given them. That was how the big mutiny began. You know, when our men were taken captive, the Japanese treated them very well, much good food, vodka, let them write home all about it, and gave them enormous pay, six yen, three dollars a month, charging the expense all up to the Czar for after the war. When at last the prisoners were to be released, the Japanese promised every man double pay, twelve roubles. But they gave them the money? No, the insects gave them each an order payable by the Russian commander in Vladivostok. So the transports came, and these men were sent ashore with these checks in their hands, and they went up to the commandant of the city, and asked for their cash that the Japanese had promised. What money did the commandant have for them? What could he do? He ordered them to go away. So they stood and discussed on the street-corners. And more men still came from the transports. Then they said, ‘We will ask the general of the forts.’ So they marched to the forts in a big crowd, and the general he also told them to go away. For a long time they talked and they persuaded the sailors to help them. So they went again to the forts, and the sailors shot at the forts, and the general ordered the artillery to shoot. But the artillery would not, so the men broke in and killed the officers and got arms and went back to the city commander. Him, too, they killed, and all Vladivostok was in mutiny for two weeks. Not an officer dared show himself. General Orlov persuaded them to let him into the town. Then many were shot, but at last the city was quiet. The Japanese are very sly insects.”

His story ends and the two officers go back to join their families. The train throbs on across the steppe.

The German gas-plant drummer, with his new Far Eastern outfit, is gathering from the missionary doctor details of treaty-port life, which are being treasured up as valuable reference data. The French fur-merchant dips back into his library copy of de Maupassant.

The rigor of the outside scene seems at length to be changing. A few scattered houses appear, and trees and fenced fields, and villages, with curling smoke rising from the chimneys. Men and children are walking about, and finally we come to the Irtish River, over which the train rumbles on a half-mile bridge. Spires and gilt domes are visible, dark wooden houses, and bright white-painted churches with green roofs. Droshkies and carts are passing in the streets, and presently we draw up to the station of Omsk, the second city of Siberia.

The junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway with the Irtish River, which is 2520 miles long and open from April to October, would of itself make Omsk a centre of great strategic importance. But in addition to this main river-highway, which is navigated by some hundred and fifty steamers, there are affluents by which one can sail from the Urals to the Altai, from the Arctic Ocean to China, and these lines of communication centre here.

From Omsk, following the Irtish down past Tobolsk, one can steam by the Obi to Obdorsk, within the Arctic Circle. Indeed, a regular grain-export service was planned via the Kara Sea to London by an ambitious Englishman. It failed after some promise of success, because of the ice-packs in the Gulf of Obi. From Omsk, following the Irtish upstream, steamer navigation extends as far as Semipalatinsk, in the Altai foothills. Smaller craft may go nearly to the Chinese frontier.

By the Tobol and Tura rivers, Tiumen, in the Ural foothills, may be reached, four hundred and twenty miles from Semipalatinsk. By ascending the Obi, a boat may go fourteen hundred and eighty miles east from Tiumen to Kuznetz on the Tom; through a canal from an Obi confluent the Yenesei River System may be entered, and from it by a short portage the Lena System. In all twenty-eight thousand miles are navigable by small craft, and seven thousand miles by steamer. Omsk is the pulsing heart of this mighty interior waterway system.

The train leaves the station, which is at a distance from the town, and once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reënter the steppe, and again the desolation settles over all. In hours of looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree,—only the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though covered with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled.

The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us at the window. He looks out over the level plain of the Barbara Steppe with manifest satisfaction.

“You admire the landscape?” we ask satirically.

He smiles. “We got big money when the line went through here. I made my first fortune then.”

He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent, and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gathered to the task.

“Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out here. None of us knew anything about construction, but three of us grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never having seen us before, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand. Would that we might do that now again.”

The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official.

“I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don Cossacks,” the contractor is saying. “I paid ten per cent to the Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government.”

“It is just,” says the judge. “Why should they, who get the property, not pay taxes?”

The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues: “For five years I farmed, and though I had a German overseer, I did not prosper. So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a tramway. The men of the city said, ‘Are all the horses dead? He of the spectacles is mad.’ Yet by importunity I got them to give me the right to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, ‘Here is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?’

“‘We will, we will,’ said the Belgians.

“From them I got a hundred and eighty thousand roubles clear, and an interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen, and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits were yet to come, the people said, ‘Shall foreigners oppress our city?’ So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the Government come after them later. It is hudoo (bad).”

“But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast money from the people?” says the railroad official. “For me, I think the Government should do it all.”

“Ni snaia, I don’t know,” says the contractor. “But I who bought stocks with the Belgians’ money (foolishly thinking that the business which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will not give again to the stock-people the money I shall make from the oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now.”

“But,” says the railway chinovnik, “does not the State do these things better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Collins, an Angleski, came proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they but one. Who other than the Government could spend a billion roubles for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future?”

“Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this! But it was such as I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the money to support it now got from the peasants’ taxes while so many clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour for the mail-trains, thirty-five versts for the express. One can go eighty versts in Europe.”

“Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in sooner? If a man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an earlier train?”

The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok.

The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells.

“We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk,” the government engineer observes.

“Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk?”

“I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest, finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov’s Library, a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway was ordered, the engineers came through to locate the line. All they asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of Tomsk! They had given two million roubles for their university, where the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engineers. ‘Give fifty, give even forty thousand,’ said the engineers. But the people of Tomsk said, ‘Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia? Have we not Yermak’s banner in the cathedral? Are we not Tomsk? You must bring the railway here anyway.’ But if the engineers had done that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, ‘in the woods.’ The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk. They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call her the stingy city of Tomsk.”

“We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar,” chimes in the judge. “There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore Kuzmilch, who bought a little house which he never left save to do some act of charity. For years he lived; then, when he died, the house was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of Tomsk as an imperial residence.”

The twenty minutes’ stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its journey through the forests.

With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the drainage-basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the administrative territory “Yeneseik” of the East Siberian Gobernia, the river sweeps from the Chinese borderland north beyond the Arctic Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mountains, the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile. Iron-mines of prehistoric antiquity are found in these valleys, relics of the old Han Dynasty of China.

Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced throughout the Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation.

Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chatting with the erstwhile contractor, observes, “This town was a main hotbed of the great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared.”

He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the Russo-Japanese War.

“On September 15 at noon, no one knows by whom or from what station, a signal of dots and dashes was tapped off. Each telegraph-operator answered the message and passed the word to the next, standing by until it was repeated back. Then, leaving all things in order, he stepped from the operating-room into the railway-station. With a motion he gave the countersign to the ticket-sellers, and each, as he received it, shut his desk, and walked out. The word went to the engineers, and each, at the signal, drew his fires and left the engine and its train forsaken on its tracks. Every postman put away his mail, closed the safe, and left his office; every diligence-agent locked his doors. From Astrakan to Archangel, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, the electric summons went, and the whole realm of Russia was paralyzed.

“With two thousand roubles, offered by the Governor-General of Poland, before them, and ten bayonets on the tender behind, an engineer and a fireman were secured to run one coach, containing a terrified prince, from Warsaw to the frontier. In the south, a few cars were started by soldiers, but beyond such rare instances, for three weeks not a train was moved. More than this, not a telegram was transmitted, not a letter delivered. Everywhere was black silence, as if all the Russias had been swept from the face of the world.

“‘More wages, and the constitution,’ was the slogan of the strikers. The official cohorts met the issue courageously, with bribes and bayonets, and little by little got the upper hand. Force and money were used unstintingly to win the operators needed and break the front of the strike. A few, who, contrary to the expectations of their mates, had remained loyal to the officials, were finally secured and protected by the soldiery. As in time one train after another was manned and moved, the men who had stayed away lost heart, knowing but too well what would be the fate of those who were left outside the breastworks. First singly, then in crowds, they returned, and the great strike was broken.”

“Here in Krasnoyarsk there was revolutionist rule for a while as well,” the manager remarks. “The troops were driven out, and we had to wait for reinforcements. Yet when I came to my office there were sixty thousand roubles in the safe, not a kopeck of which had been touched. Some of the best employees were condemned. I was very sad, and the service was very poor when they marched away.”

“What became of them?” we ask.

In a low voice he answers, “They went to the Yakutsk.”

Everybody is silent for a moment.

“Where did you say?” inquires the missionary.

“The Yakutski Oblast,” answered the chinovnik.

In Europe people talk of the rigors of Russia’s winter. In Russia of the cold of Siberia. In Siberia, along the railway, when the thermometer gets down into the forties and the sentries pick up sparrows too numb to fly, they say, “It’s as cold as the Yakutsk.”

“One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer-towed prison barge, following down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk,” the engineer continues. “For the first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest region. The interior is almost as unknown as when the Samoieds were its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called urmans, of larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches.”

“It is not alluring,” we observe.

“The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made cheval de frise, impossible to traverse save along the hunters’ trails. Another thousand versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins; eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation, extends this exiles’ oblast. Prison-stations are located in the forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed perpetually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most formidable.”

“How long do men last in the Yakutski cold?” we ask the engineer.

“Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate keep us from that road!”

The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go forward into the observation-car.

After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the railroad turns abruptly southwest, through the hilly country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central Russia in the same latitude.

The train pulls next into the station of Nishneudinsk. A booted peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps, and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a miniature of multicolored minerals, glittering from a hundred crystal facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron pyrites,—“fools’ gold,” as they called it in old Nevada times,—green porphyry, iridescent peacock ore of copper, and some black crystals like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz, and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile.

“Cabinetski?” asks the engineer.

“Da, da,” assents the peddler. “Cabinetski.”

“It comes from one of the domains of his Imperial Majesty’s Cabinet,” explains the engineer. “Stretches of forest, belts of fertile river valley, fur districts, hundreds of thousands of square versts, the best mines in these Urals which produce sometimes yearly seven million roubles, the entire Nerchinsk region, producing six million roubles, are ‘cabinetski,’” he remarks. “Even I, Ivan Vasilovich Poyarkov, am ‘cabinetski’!”

He explains the origin of the term, going back to the old days when princedoms went to the courtiers of Catherine. Always for a great enterprise it was necessary to have a friend at Court. So the rich merchants and miners would form, with powerful members of the inner circle at St. Petersburg, alliances such as that made by the Stroganovs with Boris. Gradually, as time went on, the protected were swallowed by the protectors, until one by one the various estates had passed into the hands of the nobles of the Imperial Court. The mines in the Altai, which Demidov had opened up, were taken over in 1747 by the Emperor, those in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast at about the same time. With the passing of the years, what had been graft and expropriation was transmuted into vested interest, until now it is the established right of the Imperial Cabinet, or the Grand Dukes, to receive the revenues of these vast domains. In the mining regions their perquisite is from five to fifteen per cent. Save for the tax, however, miners are free to operate upon the ducal estates, and many are thus engaged.

A fur-capped station-agent clangs the big bronze bell, waits a moment, and then clangs twice. The passengers climb back into the box-like steel cars of the express. The third bell sounds, and the train starts. We sit down beside the engineer and the conversation takes up the “cabinetski” again.

“We have great traditions. One Governor, Neryschkin, of the ‘cabinetski’ mines at Nerchinsk, marched to fight the Czar. In 1775 he was appointed chief of the mineral belt in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast. He sat for eleven months at home with closed shutters. Then, on Easter Sunday, singing a devil’s hymn, and with a fat female on either side, he drove to church and ordered the service amended to suit a rather bizarre taste. He organized a series of glittering shows at the Crown’s cost, gave free drink to the populace, and throwing out many of his subordinates, appointed convicts in their stead. When he had used up all the tax-money in his keeping, he drew up cannon before the house of the rich merchant Sibirayakov, the operator of the mines, and made him hand out five thousand roubles. Finally he got together an army of Tunguses and the peasants, to march against the Czar. He was caught on the way and sent to Russia for punishment. It is the great honor of our service to be governor over the ‘cabinetski’ mines. Perhaps I shall rise there some day. Perhaps not. But I shall not march against the Czar.”

The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow, and further east than Mandalay.

When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite geographer, the “Girdle of the World.” By actual measurements, however, in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province, and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake Baikal.

Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost of discouragement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a railroad less in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bankers sometimes shrug their shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. “Every year a deficit,” they say. “Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles,—one sixth of the Canadian Pacific Railway; one tenth of the Southern Railway. Hudoo (bad)!” One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by Russia’s need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and achievement but of little service to mankind.

Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded stockades. Murderers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has banished to the far Yakutsk.

Closer study gives, too, a better appreciation of the railroad’s economic significance. The line holds a strategic position as truly as does the Panama Canal. Though in Siberia proper there is the enormous area of nearly five million square miles, so much of this is in Arctic tundra, impassable swamp, forest, or barren steppe, that the really habitable and arable land narrows down to a tenth of this, which lies in general between the parallels of 55° and 58° 30’ north, and is contained within a belt some thirty-five hundred miles long and two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles broad.

When it is noted that the tillable area of one hundred and ninety-two thousand square miles in Tobolsk and Tomsk, mostly along the Obi System, the stretch of twenty thousand miles in the steppe, and that of one hundred thousand in the Yeneseik and Irkutsk governments of eastern Siberia, are all in immediate proximity to the railroad, whose course is generally along the 55th parallel, the economic value of Russia’s great enterprise takes a different perspective.

Its vantage is still more emphasized when the element of the north and south watercourses is considered. One after another the great Siberian rivers are crossed,—in the Tobolsk Gobernia, the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtish; in the Tomsk Gobernia, the Obi and the Tom; in Yeneseik, the Yenesei; in Irkutsk, the Angara. Each of these reaches far up into the agricultural zone that lies north of the railroad, bringing the harvests to its cars by the cheap unfettered water-avenues. Thus, to the part of Siberia that is capable of extensive development, the railroad is even now in a position to give great aid.

It is from such natural factors as these, not from financiers’ figures, that one must weigh the potentiality of this great line. Its direct value is enormous, its indirect commercial services greater yet. It may best be compared to a mighty river system such as that of the Mississippi. The latter’s traffic has never directly returned a dollar of the millions that have gone to maintaining its levees and training-walls and channels. Yet indirectly the return and the value, as an asset to the American people, are so great as to be incalculable. From its controlling position in relation to the cultivatable land and the interior watercourses of Central Siberia, as well as in relation to the far eastern artery, the Russian railway is an empire-builder as important as has been the Nile.

The results already achieved are noteworthy. The city of Omsk, where the railroad and the Irtish River lines meet, has risen from a population of thirty-seven thousand in 1897 to seventy thousand in 1908. Further east, Stretensk has sprung from a town of two thousand people ten years ago to over twelve thousand to-day. Irkutsk has climbed from sixty to over eighty thousand since the railroad opened.