A strange and curious sight it is to see a street packed with people all bowing to a little picture stuck up in the wall. The Eikon to the Russian is even more important than the Czar. He wears a miniature Eikon hung about his neck as a sort of amulet. He puts an Eikon in his house, in his shop, along his streets, and builds cathedrals and lavishes fortunes to house and adorn them. Indeed, Russia might be fitly termed the land of the Eikon, for there, as nowhere else in all the world, has a simple picture been exalted to become an object of worship. The Greek church allows no images. One of the serious causes of the great schism with Rome in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the strict interpretation by the Eastern Church of the injunction of the II Commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven images,” wherefore they declared the Roman practice rank idolatry, but to the sacred pictures they gave their sanction. These Eikons are mostly painted in the monasteries by monks of recognized holy lives. They are paintings of the Christ, or of a Saint, sometimes the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child together, and are often so overlaid with gold and jewels—tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewels—that only the eyes and the face may be seen, the draperies of the person being scrupulously imitated and concealed by the overlaid plates of gold.

This afternoon we saw a big, black, hearse-like carriage drawn by six black horses, harnessed three abreast, accompanied by priests, to which all the people took off their hats and bowed and crossed themselves as it passed along. It was an Eikon being carried to the death-bed of some penitent, who would be permitted to kiss it before death. Sometimes these Eikons work miracles and the dying sinner begins to recover so soon as it enters the room. All Russians keep Eikons in their homes, and generally have one in every room, before which a little candle is kept perpetually burning. And when a Russian enters a house, he at once goes to the family Eikon and bows and crosses himself before he greets his host. To ignore the Eikon would be an unpardonable offense. In St. Petersburg we procured a copy of the famous Eikon which reposes in the little chapel of the house of Peter the Great, the portrait of St. Alexander Nevsky, which Peter always carried with him into battle, and to the power of which he attributed the victory of Pultova. The beautiful cathedral dedicated to “Our Lady of Kazan,” upon the Nevsky Prospekt, in St. Petersburg, was erected in honor of victories brought to Russian arms by the miraculous influence of her Eikon. The Russian lives in an atmosphere of Eikons, and it takes a quick eye and an agile hand to doff your hat and properly bow, as the Russian always does, whenever you pass by one.

In this city of contrasts, in sight of the modern Gostinnoi Dvor, I must take off my hat in going through a “Holy Gate,” and every man, woman and child I here meet are crossing themselves and bowing as they pass along! In Mexico you do not feel so surprised at the superstition of the Indian! But these are white men with blue eyes and yellow hair! This is a city which contains so splendid an edifice as the monster cathedral of Saint Savior, a pile of wonderful beauty, built of white granite, and domed with five gigantic onion-shaped, cross-topped cupolas, all sheathed in plates of solid gold; it is a city which contains four hundred and fifty churches, five hundred chapels, and convents and monasteries, how many I dare not say, all of them begolded and bejeweled inside and out with barbaric emblazonry. And yet it is a city, the streets of which are as ill-paved and as stinking as were London’s five hundred years ago; a city where trade and enterprise are throttled by arbitrary and excessive taxation, while the common people have no schools, even as they have no votes.

We had just left the Imperial palace of the Kremlin, the most gorgeous edifice my eyes have ever looked upon, where I had beheld such chambers of gold and precious jewels and priceless tapestry, as one only reads about in the Tales of the Arabian Nights; where the vast Hall of St. George in the Czar’s new palace is plated with gold from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling is altogether of gold; where is gold along the walls, panels of alabaster showing in between, ivory finish and gold, gold and lapis lazuli, gold and emerald malachite, gold in leaf, gold in heavy plate—gold everywhere. We were but the moment come out from this stupendous display of riches. We had just passed through the Holy Savior Gate. Our senses were still dazzled with this excess of reckless magnificence, when we found ourselves upon the Red Square—“Red” because of the human blood spilled there in the countless massacres of Moscow’s citizens by past Czars,—amidst the swarming throngs of the abjectly poor; men and women, pinched-faced and hollow-eyed; men and women who toil with patient, dull, dumb hopelessness, and who are thankful to eat black bread through all their lives, who are become mere human brutes! We saw many groups of these, gnawing chunks of the black bread for their dinner with all the zest of famished wolves, while they bowed and crossed themselves incessantly, thanking God that they were indeed alive!

The wanton luxury of the rich, the pinching poverty of the poor, so widespread, so universal in Russia, appal and shock me upon every hand. What are the political and social conditions which let these things be possible is the query which constantly hammers on my brain! Until to-day, I have never understood the light and shadow of Roman history, nor what manner of men made up the hosts and hordes of Alaric and of Attila. Here, you see the whole story right upon these streets.

We have not only visited the Kremlin, its cathedrals and its palaces, its museums and its buildings of note, but we have also stood before and gazed upon that wonder of all churches, the cathedral of St. Basil, the weird and gorgeous creation of Vassili Blagenoi, and lasting monument to the artistic sense of that monster-tyrant, Ivan the IV, called the “Terrible.”

In the cathedral of the Archangel Michael, within the sacred precincts of the Kremlin, lie now their coffins side by side, costly coverings of gold-bespangled velvet enshrouding each; a strange example of the equality of death. The story runs: so delighted was Ivan with the extraordinary and curious beauty of Vassili’s creation, that he gave a sumptuous banquet in his honor within the Imperial palace and there, lavishly bepraising him before the assembled company, declared that it were impossible for human mind to create another building so wonderful in all the world. Whereupon turning to Vassili, he inquired of the flattered and delighted architect whether this declaration were not the truth. The gratified creator of the wonderful cathedral is said to have replied, “Ah, Sire, give me the money and I will build you another a thousand times more beautiful than the poor work I have already done.” Hearing this, the Terrible Ivan turned to his headsman who stood ever handy at his elbow, and ordered Vassili’s eyes to be immediately burnt out with red-hot irons, in order, as he declared, that there should never be again created so splendid an edifice; then, Vassili dying as a result of the operation, Ivan ordered a magnificent funeral and directed that the body be laid within the consecrated chamber of the cathedral, among the princes of the blood, where even to-day it yet remains.

Our Hungarian guide vowed that this tale was the literal truth, pointing to the coffin which lay at our feet, among the relics of the house of Rurik, as evidence incontrovertible. Nor did we presume to doubt this instance of Ivan’s cruelty, so thick spotted are the pages of history with a thousand other instances of his devilish acts.

Ivan loved the sight and smell of blood. As a boy he delighted to torture domestic animals, and to ride down old women when he caught them on the streets. As a man, he had the Archbishop of Novogorod sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and thrown to savage dogs; frequently he dispatched his enemies with his own sword, and he publicly murdered his eldest son, the Czarevitch. No malevolent scheme of the human mind was too cruel for his enjoyment. By him entire cities were devoted to destruction on the most trifling pretext. For one instance, the inhabitants of the commercial towns of Novogorod (sixty thousand in Novogorod alone) and of Tver and of Klin were massacred in cold blood under his personal supervision. He was more cruel than Nero or Caligula, and compared with the appalling atrocities of his reign, Louis XI and Ferdinand VII were gentle kings.

His presumption was equal to his cruelty, and he did not hesitate to send his Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth to offer her the privilege of becoming his eighth bride. History knows no such other monster as Ivan the Terrible, who was undoubtedly mad; and yet he built beautiful churches and palaces, and did more to encourage art and culture within the confines of the empire than any other of the Russian Czars.

We have also driven about the city and viewed the public buildings, the shops and the markets, and this afternoon have come out across the river Moskva, and climbed the hills of Vorobievy Gory, the “Sparrow Hills,”—from the heights of which Napoleon, on that memorable fourteenth day of September, 1812, fresh from the victory of Borodino, first viewed the city. In superb panorama, Holy Moscow lay stretched before us, its towers, its spires, its red and green and blue and yellow walls and roofs, its golden domes, presenting a most sumptuous harmony of color to the delighted eye.

While St. Petersburg is the political capital, yet Moscow is the real center of Russia. Here is the focus of Russia’s industrial, commercial, financial and religious life. Her “Chinese Bank” cashes notes on Kashgar and Pekin, and sells bills of exchange upon their banks in return. The street-life of this most Russian city, the coming and going of its people, the commingling of these divers tribes and races, strikingly illustrates the heterogeneous character of the cumbrous empire. Here pass me by the blue-eyed, tow-polled mujiks from the provinces; here I meet, face to face, the swarthy skins which tell of Tiflis and of Teheran; here I touch elbows with kaftan-gowned traders from Merv and Samarkand, and silk-clad Chinese merchants from the distant East.

As I stroll along the Nickols-Skaia, the Iliinka-Skaia, or the Rojdestvensky Boulevard, and catch the glances of these faces which stare upon me with constant grave suspicion, doubtful, perchance, whether I am a foreign spy in bureaucratic employ, or a stranger friendly to the held-down people, I am musing upon the curious interweaving of science and superstition, of modern and mediaeval custom, which I here behold, and I ponder how work the hearts and minds behind these masks which alone I see. Profound suspicion and discontent is the impression I receive. Nowhere do I note a single instance of that joyous hopefulness which marks men’s faces in America. The eye which here looks into mine has about it a gaze not frank and sunny, but furtive and melancholy as that of a chained-up wolf. Gradually I am beginning to comprehend that the men I look upon, although clothed in the veneer of twentieth century civilization, are nevertheless in mind and heart barbarians,—barbarians chafing beneath the bitter burden of the hateful auto-bureaucratic rule; they are Asiatic rather than European; even in discontent they lack the open-mindedness of the West; they belong to the mysterious and inscrutable peoples of the East. Napoleon’s saying, “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar,” now comes to me with redoubled force.

Despite the French telephones and the Chicago-built Bazaar, despite the splendid churches and the gorgeous Kremlin, I perceive that these Russians are yet the same as when Byzantium sent St. Cyril and his monks to Christianize their savage ancestors thirteen centuries ago.

XX.
The Splendid Pageant of the Russian Mass—The Separateness of Russian Religious Feeling From Modern Thought—Russia Mediaeval and Pagan.

Moscow, Russia, September 21, 1902.

We have just been leaning over a guard rail of burnished brass, peering down into the half twilight gloom, beholding ten thousand Russian men and women bending their swaying bodies, as a wheat field bends before the wind, crossing themselves in feverish fervor, even bowing the forehead to the marble floor and kissing it rapturously in the solemn celebration of the mass.

We drove in a landau,—all four of us and our Hungarian guide,—through the narrow, crowded streets. “Drove,” I say! Rather I should say whirled, behind two mighty black Arab stallions, which no man might hold, but only guide, and we never slackened our pace until we dashed up to the great white granite stairway of the vast cathedral of Saint Savior. Our Russian driver yelled, men and vehicles fled from our path, and yet we ran over no one, we killed no one! Our furious horses stopped short on their haunches. Two Russian soldiers now held them by their heads. We drove like nobles. We must be grandees!

The cathedral of Saint Savior has been nearly a century in building. Founded in commemoration of the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, it has been slowly raised by means of the multitudinous contributions of the Russian people. It is a square cross in outline, as lofty as the capitol at Washington, and surmounted by five oriental domes, the central one bigger than the other four, all topped with Greek crosses, and all covered with plates of solid gold, the burnished glittering splendor of which dazzle the eyes long miles away. Within, the interior is tiled with rare marbles of divers colors, while the walls are decorated with priceless paintings by the most illustrious Russian artists of the century, done by them at the command of the Czar, with pillars of malachite and lapis lazuli, green and blue, standing between the splendid pictures. There are altars of solid silver covered with rare embroideries of gold and emblazoned with precious stones. Close by each altar rests an Eikon.

A soldier in gold lace uniform opened our carriage door. He led us up the long flight of white steps—white in the golden sunlight—and pushed his way and ours through the bowing, crossing, sweating, stinking (the Russian really never takes a bath) thousands, who, like ourselves, sought to enter the precincts of the most magnificent cathedral of “Holy Russia.” We jostled against rich merchants and their wives clad in splendid furs and silks and adorned with many jewels; against military officers in long gray coats, high boots and caps of astrakhan wool or fur; and peasants, in sheepskin coats, belted at the waist, their legs wrapped in cotton cloth tied with leathern thongs, their feet bound up in straw. These farmers from the country are too poor to afford the luxury of socks and shoes. Through all these the soldier with our pourboire in his hand, forced his way—not always gently—and led us up a winding flight of one hundred steps to the series of galleries which run round the immense interior. Here he again forced back the press of people until we might lean over the great brass rail and gaze down below! And what a spectacle! There, were ten thousand, twenty thousand,—I dare not say how many, men and women; all standing; all bowing; all devoutly responding to the intoning of the priests! Three hundred men and boys clad in red and purple and golden vestments were chanting the melancholy music of the Russian Church! No organ is there allowed, no musical instrument, no instrument save that which God has made, the human throat! Then, from the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, comes out the Archbishop of all the Russias, the Metropolitan of “Holy Moscow,” clad in vestments of gold and of silver, intoning the mystery of the mass! Other priests stand close behind him, swinging censers of incense, and also chanting in melancholy mournful harmony with the mighty melody of the choir. Never have my senses apprehended such opulent, refulgent splendor, such a pageant of gold and of purple, of jewels and of fine linen, such clouds of incense, such glorious, mighty music from the human throat! Such fervor, such frenzy, such exaltation as I now beheld in the swaying, worshiping multitude! I was beholding the fervant, fanatical, hysterical religious feeling of the Russian people, a people mediaeval in their blind superstition, mediaeval in their per-fervid ardor for their church!

What I am writing of can only be impressions, and yet perhaps the impressions which I receive in my brief sojourn within the Russian Empire may more vividly portray that subtle, almost indefinable, atmosphere which broods over Russia and marks it from all the world, than I might be able to do if I remained so long within her confines that I should lose the power.

I have now sojourned in Russia barely seven days, yet I feel as though I had spent a lifetime in another world than that of America. I hear no sound which is familiar. I cannot even count in Russian. I see no street signs which my eyes have before beheld; even the alphabet, though Greek, is yet enigmatically Russianized. Nor do I find that English or Danish, French or German is of much avail. In the largest news emporium or bookstore, in St. Petersburg, upon the Nevsky Prospekt, the other day, where twenty or thirty clerks were serving the public, there was no one of them who spoke or even understood either French, or German, much less English. In the chief bookstore in Moscow, where a large trade is carried on, nothing is spoken but Russian. After much search I did find one small bookshop where a clerk spoke passable French, and another where the Jewish proprietor understood German. And while it is true that the high Russian officer who escorted us from St. Petersburg spoke fluently in German and in French, and while it may also be true that among the bureaucracy, and perhaps nobility, French is still generally understood, yet it is equally true that the present tendency in Russia is to Russify language as well as things, and that foreign tongues are less spoken and less known to-day than they were thirty or forty years ago. The Russian is absorbed in himself, he knows little of the outside world and he cares less. The news of Europe and of America and of all the earth only comes to him in expurgated driblets through the sieve of the Censor. The saying that “there are three continents,” the “continent of Europe,” the “continent of Russia” and the “continent of Asia,” is no mere jest. One feels it here to be a verity. One feels that Russia, despite her pretensions to the contrary, is mediaeval, that she is mentally and morally aloof from all the progress of the present century, from all the thought of modern peoples, and utterly remote from all touch with the progressive nations of to-day.

In Scandinavia, the world is abreast of the times, its peoples are advanced and alert, but the instant you cross the dead-line and enter Russia, you feel that the world has taken a back-set of five hundred years, that Russian life is so far behind all modern movement that it never can catch up.

Even the bigness of St. Petersburg carries with it an impracticability that is itself mediaeval. St. Petersburg did not grow up because there was need of a city on that spot. It was created as the deliberate act of a despot. Peter the Great feared to live longer in Moscow. He had murdered and tortured too many of its worthy citizens. He had, for one job, hung eight thousand patriots in the Red Square; he had thrown ten thousand more into dungeons, there to rot. Daring no longer to live in Moscow, he founded the new capital, “Petersburg,” on the banks of the Neva, which should become a seaport, be protected from his own subjects by the ships he himself would build, and house his government as safe from domestic as from foreign foes. He laid out the city with streets so wide that it has never been possible to pave them well. He provided public buildings so huge that it has never been possible to secure a foundation upon the Neva’s miry delta solid enough safely to hold them up. He drove the nobility into this quagmire city, and drew the bureaucracy up to its unstable ground. To-day, St. Petersburg is a city of a million and a half of inhabitants, but if the Russian Czars should choose to reconstitute Moscow their permanent capital, St. Petersburg would again become a wilderness, a waste of marshy islands, desolate and bare. It is the hot-house plant of autocracy. There is no natural reason for it to exist.

Everywhere in Russia one feels the certain so childish straining after effect which is mediaeval and barbaric. In the palace of the Kremlin lies the disabled and gigantic cannon which Catherine II commanded to be cast, and which has never fired a shot for the reason that it was so big they could never find a gunner to serve and handle it. Close beside it lies the enormous bell, the “Czar Kolokol”—King of Bells—cast by command of a Czar, so huge that it could never be lifted up into a belfry and which, falling to the ground from a temporary scaffold, cracked itself by sheer weight. It lies there a fit commentary on overleaping ambition. The cars and locomotives of the railways are uncouth from their very size. Russia is like a big, loose-jointed, over-grown boy, a boy so constituted that he may never become a veritable man.

The government arsenals and machine shops in Moscow are run by German and English bosses. The Russian makes big plans, but he does not possess the power himself to carry them to successful issue. The great empire is so spread out that pieces of it are even now ready to break off. An intelligent Swede with whom I voyaged from Stockholm, then living in St. Petersburg, declared the day not far distant when not only Finland, but the German provinces of Esthonia and Livonia and Courland along the Baltic, as well as Poland, must inevitably crack off. And he declared that from mere internal cumbersomeness the Russian Empire must soon dissolve. It may be so. And one is here impressed with the fact that Russia now chiefly holds together by reason of the military might of her autocracy, whose strength and permanence under serious defeat may vanish in a night.

Another thing I have become cognizant of is the fact that everywhere the men who do not wear a uniform hate the men who do. The cleavage parting the upper and the lower levels of Russian life is immense. Apparently there is no sympathy between them. The mujik upon the street scowls at the uniformed official who drives by in his dashing equipage. He looks with surly countenance upon the grandee who nearly runs him down. He hates the men who so mercilessly wield authority and power, and who order the Cossack to ride him down and knout and saber him into terrified submission.

One morning we passed through a great square in Moscow containing nothing but men—wild-eyed, long-haired, long-bearded men; men in rags, most of them, and all of them compelled to come there and wait to be hired to work. To that square must all working men go who seek work. The city feeds them while they wait, a single small piece of black bread each day. Some never leave that square, but wait there their lifetime through. They gazed upon our handsome landau with hungry and wolfish eyes. How glad would they have been to tear us into pieces and divide what little spoil they might obtain! I never before beheld so frightful, unkempt a company of hopeless, hapless, hungry human slaves as these Russian workingmen who waited for a job.

XXI.
The First Snows—Moscow to Warsaw—Fat Farm Lands and Frightful Poverty of the Mujiks Who Own them and Till them—I Recover My Passport.

Hotel Savoy, Friedichs Strasse,

Berlin, Germany, September 23, 1902.

“Hoch der Kaiser, Hoch der Kaiser! Gott sei Dank! Ich bin in Deutschland angekommen!” have my brain and blood and bones been crying out all the last fifty miles, since we safely crossed the Russian border. Until the moment when the last Russian official waked me up, held a light in my face, and, staring at me, compared my visage with what the passport said it ought to be, and handed me back that document to be mine forever, to be framed and hung up in my Kanawha home, and preserved for my children and children’s children as evidence that I came safe out of Russia; not till that midnight hour did I realize that I belonged to the common Teutonic brotherhood of men, and that Puritan-descended American though I were, I and my German neighbor were yet really kin! But at that moment when we crossed the German boundary, I knew it and felt it in every fibre and tingling nerve. I was a Teuton, I was a German, I was come again among my blood kindred. “Hoch der Kaiser,” “Selig sei Deutschland!” I had come out of mediaevalism, from the shadows of barbarism, I was emerged into the light of the twentieth century’s sun!

We left Moscow late Sunday afternoon, in a blinding snow storm, the first of the year.

In the morning, after attending mass in the cathedral of Saint Savior, we drove about the city enjoying the cloudless blue sky, the pellucid sunshine. We visited the Gentile and Jewish markets, and watched the pressing concourse of eager traders bartering and chaffering their goods and wares; we passed along the high frowning walls of the debtors’ prison, where any man who has incurred a debt of five hundred rubles ($250) may be incarcerated by the creditor, and kept shut up as long as the said creditor puts up for him the very modest sum of about four cents a day for bread. When the creditor quits paying for his debtor’s keep, the debtor comes out, but not till then. The fare at that price is not luxurious, and after a few weeks or months of the meagre diet, the debtor joyfully promises anything to escape and, sometimes, persuades his family or friends to compound with the creditor and get him out. But some there are who spend a lifetime within those walls. And our Orthodox driver declared that a Jew liked nothing better than to thrust and hold a hapless Gentile debtor behind those gates.

The day was lovely and the air had almost the balminess of spring. Men and women and children were going about in summer garments, no overcoats or wraps, and it might as well have been May or June. At the same time, we noticed that the windows of our rooms in the hotel were double-sashed and tight-corked with cotton, and I also observed that similar double windows were fast set on public buildings and dwelling-houses past which we drove. But otherwise, as we looked into the soft blue sky there was no hint of approaching frosts.

It was near noon when we drove out to see the famous convent of Novo Dievitchy, and we spent a delightful hour in viewing its towered church, its cloisters, its nuns’ cells and children’s quarters, and the curious cemetery where are entombed many of Moscow’s most illustrious dead, tombs which are set above the ground amidst choice shrubbery and blooming plants. We had just come out, through the old arched gateway, and had encountered a band of holy beggars who absorbed our attention and our kopeeks. I had put the ladies into the landau, while the driver with great difficulty held back his restive, squealing stallions. My hand was on the carriage door, when I felt something soft and cold upon it. I looked up and behold! the air was full of big flakes of descending snow. The horizon to the north and east was black, the blue sky had grown a leaden gray. Winter had come to Moscow and to us as silently and as suddenly as it once came to Napoleon and his thinclad army, near a century ago. There was no wind; the noises of the city were suddenly hushed; a great silence now brooded over Moscow. The air was thick with big, fluffy, fluttering particles of whiteness which stuck to everything they touched, and never melted when they ceased to fall. We could not see across the road, even the horses were half hid. Our driver gave full rein to the impatient team and we flew homeward, but the snow kept coming down just the same. It never melted anywhere. It grew into piles and mounds and soft feathery masses. It wholly concealed the scarred and rutted unevennesses of the road, it clung to twig and tree and fence, to gable, to window-ledge and lintel. King Winter had breakfasted in Archangel and, speeding across flat and unbarriered Russia, now dined in Moscow and would there permanently remain. And as suddenly all Moscow now bloomed forth into sheepskin overcoats and elaborate furs and winter wraps. The citizens must have had them hanging behind the door upon a handy peg, ready for just such a sudden coming of the snows. By afternoon, sleighs and sledges jingled along the ways and boulevards, and stinking, filthy-streeted Moscow was transformed into a city immaculate and pure. And the snow kept ever falling, falling, falling, steadily, softly, persistently, without let or stop.

It was toward two o’clock that we took our final excursion out beyond the borders of the city to the summer palace of the Czars, the favorite Chateau Petrovsky, where prior to the coronation every Czar goes to repose and meditate and prepare himself with fasting and prayer for the ordeal of the tedious ceremonial in the Cathedral of the Assumption within the Kremlin.

The Chateau is a large and rambling building of wood and brick, with extensive suites of big, bare rooms. Behind it there lies a garden, laid out as though it were in France, with many graveled walks, and beds of flowers and edges of close-clipped box. Here the Czarina loves to wander, and here she passes many a quiet hour when escaped from the pomp and pressure of life in the Kremlin’s gaudy palace. Here one bed of roses was pointed out to us as her especial joy. The old French gardener looked pathetic as he stood beside it and watched the big white flakes alighting upon each leaf and petal. “The snows are come,” he said, “the garden dies, there will be no flowers more till another year!” And then, as if to save his cherished pets, he hastily gathered the finest of the blooms and presented them to H and begged her to accept and keep them, saying, “The snows are come, the Czarina, the Empress, will not now object; to-morrow these will surely all be dead.”

In the morning of the day before, we were told that, “To-morrow, or next day, or in a week, or a fortnight, will come the snows, we do not know how soon. But when they come, then we know that winter is begun, the long seven months of winter which will not leave us till May or June. It is then you should come to see us. Then are these ill-paved and reeking streets white and hard and clean; the summer’s dusts and heats are then forgot, and we quicken with the invigoration of the cold; then does the city gladden with the gay life of those returned from the summer’s toil upon the wide estates, or from foreign lands, for winter is the season when all Russians best love to be at home.”

We settled our hotel bills only after much argument with our host. We would not pay for candles we had not burned; our room was lighted with electric lights. We would not pay for steaks we had not eaten, nor chickens yet alive, nor for sweets we never tasted. No! For these and the like of these we flatly refused to pay. “De Vaiter’s meeshtakes, Mein Herr, sie shall kom oudt.” One hundred rubles for three days! Moscow was as costly as London!

Through the falling snows, thick falling snows, we drove to the Smolensk railway station, whence start the trains going west, for Moscow has not yet arrived at the convenience of a union depot. Although all railroads are owned and run by the government, yet each train starts from that side of the city nearest to the direction it will travel. We entered a long, low brick and wooden building, and passing through a wide dark waiting room, came out upon a wooden platform and were beside our train. We were ready to go. We had our tickets and our passports. Three days before, almost as soon as we arrived, we gave the forty-eight hours’ notice of our intention to leave Russia, and the twenty-four hours’ notice that we should also leave Moscow. We were permitted to take our passports to the main ticket office up within the city, the Kitai Gorod, and presenting them, secured the tickets. We then returned the passports to the police department to be given back to us just before we left, by the big uniformed official at our hotel. But he did not return them until we first bestowed upon him another ten rubles, as we had done when leaving St. Petersburg! Now we were once more to surrender our passports to a new uniformed government official, the train conductor, who would also examine them, visé them, and hand them to another when we came to Warsaw, to be yet again scrutinized and stamped and only returned to us when we at last crossed the German border. Nor even then until we should be finally inspected and compared by yet other officials so as to make dead certain that we were indeed the very self same travelers who now declared they wanted to get out of Russia.

The train was a long one. It was the through express carrying the Imperial Mails to Vienna, Berlin and Paris. It would pass Smolensk, Minsk, “Brzesc” (Brest) and Warsaw. It was one of the important trains of the empire. There were many passengers, and we were able to secure only a single stateroom with two berths in the first-class car for the ladies, while Mr. C and I obtained two berths in the second class car adjoining. We might sit together during the day, but for the night we would be in different coaches. The berths in our sleeper were provided each with a mattress, and an extra ruble gave us a pair of blankets, a sheet and a pillow. The cars were warm and double-windowed against the cold.

We went about twenty miles an hour over a straight-tracked road, and our sleep was undisturbed. When I awoke in the morning and made my way toward the toilet, though early, I yet found a queue of men and women ahead of me, and had to fall in line and take my turn. A big bearded Jew was just coming out of the little toilet room and a slim young woman was just going in, a young woman comely and with hair tangled and fallen down. This was bad enough, but between the tangled hair and myself stood another dame with locks quite as disheveled and unkempt. But I dared not quit my place, since an increasing number of men and women pressed uneasily behind me. My only chance was to stick it out until those coiffures should be restored to immaculate condition for the day. Within the toilet there was no soap, nor towel, nor comb, nor brush, nor else but ice-cold water, and a wide open channel down into the bitter stinging air. But I had now journeyed somewhat in Russia and had come fitly prepared.

All night we had rolled through a dead flat country, passing Smolensk, a large city of fifty thousand inhabitants, and all day we continued to traverse the same wide levels. The sky was blue, the air was cold and keen, there was a slight drifting of snow across the illimitable fields. Peasants in belted sheepskin overcoats, which came down to the heels, were plowing in the fields, each behind a single horse, and women on their knees were planting, or digging out potatoes and turnips and beets. Women were also hoeing everywhere, working like the men—mostly in short skirts, kerchiefs about the head, legs swathed in cotton cloth wrapped around and tied on with strings, feet like the men’s, wrapped up in plaited straw. The houses were miserable wooden huts of only one story and with chimneys made of sticks and mud and built on the inside to save heat, and meaner than any cabins of the most “ornery” mountaineers of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. There were no windows in the hovels, no openings but one single door. For the men and women who tilled the land, it was poverty, bitter poverty everywhere. Yet we were traversing some of the finest, richest, most productive farming lands of Russia; lands on which great and abundant crops are raised, or ought to be raised, and where these men and women ought to be living in ease and comfort by their toil, for these lands are largely owned by those who till and cultivate them, the “free and emancipated” peasantry of Russia! But the great crops are of little avail to the helpless peasant. His industry brings him no cessation of grinding toil. He barely lives, often he starves, sometimes he dies, dies of starvation right on this rich, fat land he himself owns. The government of the Czar knows just what each acre of his land will yield, and knowing this, it takes from the peasant in taxes the product of his sweat and toil, leaving him barely enough to live. There are no schools to teach the peasant. The high Russian officer, the lieutenant colonel who guarded us from St. Petersburg to Moscow, said, “The peasant wants no schools.” Thus, he never learns his rights, the rights God wills to him. He keeps on toiling year in and year out, and the government of the Czar squeezes from him his tears, his blood, his kopeeks, his life! And these men I saw were white men and owned the land, fat, fertile land, rejoicing ever in abundant crops!

A century ago, even thus were also the peasants of France ground down and pillaged by the King, the nobility, the government of the state. As I traveled through the fruitful valley of the Loire two years ago, crossing central France, and beheld the smiling fields and well-planted meadows and perpetual cultivation of every foot of soil, until the whole land bloomed and bore crops like one mighty garden, I could not help wondering, as I looked upon the smiling countenance of the terrain, and upon the contented faces of the sturdy and thrifty peasantry who owned and tilled it, whether this present fecundity and agricultural wealthiness of rural France, does not, after all, repay the world and even France herself, for the terrors and the tears, the blood and the obliteration of the l’ancien régime, whose expungement by the Revolution alone made possible to-day a regenerated and rejoicing France.

We have passed through Minsk, the ancient capital of Lithuania, a city of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants of whom more than half are Jews, and through Brzesc (pronounced “Brest”), another city as big as Smolensk and renowned as a fortress, taken and retaken, lost and relost, through all the weary centuries of Polish-Muskovite wars. We have crossed the river Bug (“Boog”) on a fine steel bridge, and entering pillaged Poland, are now arrived within the borders of her great capital, Warsaw (“Barcoba,” “Varsova”), where we change to a train of German cars, of the narrower German gauge, and go on to Berlin.

Just after leaving Minsk, I fell into conversation with a most intelligent young Jew from Warsaw, who, among other things, spoke of Russia and her ways, saying that, strange as it may seem, the people of Poland prefer her harsh rule to the fairer dealing of the Germans, for the reason that Pole and Russ both talk a Slavic tongue, and race affinity constitutes a bond. Yet said he at the same time, all Poles dream of the day when a Polish King shall again fill a Polish throne, and the glories of their Fatherland shall be restored.

We reached Warsaw only two hours late and pulled into the large stone station close alongside the Berlin train. The porter grabs our bags. Our small steamer trunk is shown to hold no vodka, nor contraband effects. “Nach Berlin,” I shout, and we are transferred to a clean, comfortable German car. Gott sei Dank! we feel a thousand times. We are almost free, almost escaped, almost beyond the Russian pale. For a fortnight, we have been under constant, conscious, persistent surveillance. Our guides have been in the employ of the police; strange men have followed us about upon the streets, have sat beside us in hotels, have scrutinized us with cold eyes upon the trains. We have been under the direct guard of armed soldiers, who have stood outside our stateroom door and slept beside us all the night. We have never, since entering Russia, been free from the weasel-wit and ferret-eye of incessant espionage!

And the dirt! Dirty cars! Dirty hotels! Dirty carriages! Dirty streets! Dirty churches! Dirty palaces! Dirty men! Dirty women! Such is Russia, a land where the world knows not water, except to skate upon when turned to ice.

Now we are in a German car, immaculately clean! Clean, almost, as it would be in Norway! We are in the modern world again. I feel great pressure in my heart to “Hoch der Kaiser”, and this despite the fact that, like every right-minded American, I am bred to abhor the assumptions of Hohenzollern Kaisership even as strenuously as Romanoff Autocracy. Yes! I feel great impulse to Hoch der Kaiser and to cheer for Germany and my German kin.

XXII.
The Slav and the Jew—The Slav’s Envy and Jealousy of the Jew.

Now that I have had a glimpse of Russia, you ask me, “Why is the Slav always so eager to do to death the Jew?” Wherefore this hatred which so constantly flames out in grievous pillage and wanton murder and blood-thirsty massacre of the children of Israel?

You say to me that in America for two centuries we have had the Jew; that we now have millions of Jews, and that they are patriotic and loyal citizens of the Republic; that Jews sit in our highest courts and render able and fair decisions, enter the senate of the United States and sit in congress, are sent to West Point and Annapolis and prove themselves devoted and efficient officers of the army and navy, are lawyers and doctors and distinguished members of the learned professions; that they display intelligence, industry and thrift, and are among the foremost citizens of the Republic, and that many of these Jews, or their fathers and mothers, have come direct from Russia. And you ask me “Why is it then that within the dominion of the Czar the Slav makes such constant war upon the Jew?”

If I were briefly to sum up my impressions of the real cause of the Slav’s hatred of the Jew, I should say, jealousy and envy, and then ask you to remember that the Slav is yet at heart a semi-Asiatic and a barbarian.

When journeying from St. Petersburg to Moscow the Russian lieutenant-colonel said to me: “In America you select real men for Presidents of whom Roosevelt is the finest type, but in France the JEWS and financiers set up their tool for President.” In a nut shell this high Russian officer expressed the feeling of his own race toward the Jew. The Jew is a Jew and the Jew is a financier. The Russians are jealous of his acquired wealth and of his ability to gather it and they hate him.

A few days later, traveling from Moscow to Warsaw, we found ourselves sitting in a dining car with an elaborate bill of fare before us and yet we were like to starve right then and there. The menu was printed in Russian; the attendants and waiters talked nothing but Russian. We knew no Russian and spoke in English, in German, in French, in Danish without avail. The servants just stood there shaking their heads and saying, “Nyett, Nyett.” (“No, No.”) We were famishing but could order no food. Just then a tall woman of courtly manner, elegantly gowned, came toward us from another table and said in perfect English that she had long lived in London, though now she resided in Russia, and then, giving our orders to the waiters, she saved us from impending famine. She afterward told me that her passport had lapsed, and that the Russian Government now refused to let her leave Russia because she was a Jewess, while at the same time, they forbade her to remain longer in Moscow, she having recently become a widow, and under the harsh laws of Russia thereby lost her right of domicile within the city. She hoped to escape to America by bribing the officials at the border.

At Vilna, I fell into acquaintance with a young Pole from Warsaw, who spoke seven languages and among them German and English fluently, although he had never been outside the dominions of the Czar. He was a strict Jew, and he expressed great surprise when I assured him that in America a Jew is treated just the same as a Christian. He said he had heard that to be indeed really the fact, and he expressed the intention of some day coming to America to see for himself. He seemed both perplexed and gratified when he found that I showed him the same consideration I did my Gentile acquaintances.

In Moscow we drove past the imposing front of the great Jewish Synagogue. The doors were barred. The structure was falling into decay. I learned that it had been closed for nigh twenty years by order of the Imperial Governor of Moscow, Prince Vladimir, uncle of the Czar; nor might any Synagogue now be opened in Moscow; nor might any Jew now worship in any edifice; nor might any outside Jew now come and live in Moscow; nor might any Jew living in Moscow come back if he had once left the limits of the city; nor might he own any land in the city, nor practice a profession; nor might he marry a Christian, nor might a Christian marry him. The Jews were also subjected to extra and particular special taxes, arbitrarily levied and collected by the autocratic government. The Jew, right here in “Holy Moscow,” soul and heart-center of the vast Russian Empire, was pillaged under the autocratic rule of the Czar, persecuted under the hand of the Holy Orthodox Church, plagued and preyed upon by a perpetually jealous and malevolent populace.

The Russian army officer sneering at Monsieur Loubet, President of France, whom he called the “tool of Jews and Financiers;” the courtly Jewish lady; the intelligent Jewish merchant of Warsaw, who was so much astonished that I should show him the courtesy of an equal, the lowly izvostchik driving me in his droschky and pointing out the closed and moldering Synagogue; each and all discovered in their divers ways the attitude of the Slav toward the Jew; and the officer revealed in his criticism of the ruler of Russia’s ally, the Republic of France, the real underlying secret cause of the Russian’s animosity and hatred of the Jew. That cause of hatred is the Jew’s ability to prosper without and in spite of the fostering care of the autocracy.

The Jew was a cultivated citizen-of-the-world when the Slavic ancestors of the Russian were unlettered nomads roving the illimitable wastes of Scythia. In the temples and libraries of ancient Egypt the Jew acquired the culture and the learning of the Pharaohs; amidst the palaces and hanging-gardens of Imperial Babylon and Nineveh the Jew learned the arts and the sciences of the Assyrian and Persian; Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers recognized in the Jew a spiritual culture of exalted type, and granted him to possess a learning as encompassing as their own; the Roman, practical, and master of the then known world, paid homage to the cultivated intelligence of the Jew.