MR. MEDHURST, the charming and companionable British consul for southeast Russia, urged my visiting Yusofka in the government of Yekaterinoslaff.

“Come down for a week-end,” he urged. “You will see the deepest mines and the biggest mills in the country. You will find conditions favorable for visiting the workmen in their homes as well as watching them at work. And, besides, you will see a British colony in Russia that I am prouder of than anything else in this whole country.”

We were then in Rostov-on-Don. Yusofka is difficult to reach from any point, but Mr. Medhurst wired Mr. Arthur Hughes, who was in command of the “works” at Yusofka that we were leaving Rostov early that evening, and would reach a certain junction at 1 A.M. From this junction to Yusofka the railroad is owned by the New Russia Company, and a special train would have to be sent to meet us.

The ride to Tagenrock on the Sea of Azov through the gathering night was quickly made, and from there our road turned west and inward. Mr. Medhurst told me fascinating tales of ancient Greek towns along the way, towns lost to the world centuries ago. The mounds of crumbled dwellings, storm-swept through long years, are almost wholly screened by the soil and turf that sea-winds have blown over them, but the story of their forgotten glory will be disclosed when science or commerce toss aside the accumulations of the centuries revealing the buried temples, the homes of the traders, the relics of a dead civilization.

In a drenching rain-storm we transferred to the private train that was to convey us to Yusofka. It wasn’t much of a train—a small freight engine, and a box-car—but it answered the purpose. We rattled noisily through the black, tempestuous night toward the flaring furnaces of Yusofka which we could plainly see ahead. Suddenly there was a tremendous shriek from the engine, the brakes shut down and the train brought to such a rough standstill that both Medhurst and I fell over. The grimy head of the engineer poked through the door and in a terrified voice the man cried:

“Oh, barin, barin [master, master], what’s to be done? Another train is coming this way on our track!”

There was no doubt in my mind what was to be done. In the phrase of the sea I would order “full speed astern.”

Not so Medhurst.

With the nonchalance of an Englishman in full command of himself and the situation Medhurst replied:

“Go back to your engine. Open your whistle, ring your bell—if you have one—drive ahead at top speed, make enough noise to warn every train on the track; if they don’t hear—run through them!”

I trembled at these words. But Medhurst knew the men he was dealing with. The other train pulled up and backed away the instant our whistle began to toot, and we rolled into Yusofka station in safety.

Mr. Hughes had sent a carriage for us, a great open barouche drawn by a pair of magnificent black Orloff horses that traveled over the ground much faster than the local trains.

The Hughes’ house is like a delightful English country home, built for comfort, with ample room for guests, and a large stable across the court.

Arthur Hughes welcomed us, and led us directly to a tempting supper—hot soup and a cold bird.

“You’ll forgive my sending a goods-car for you, gentlemen,” he began, almost before we got into the house; “but the mother of one of the men fell ill and we had to send her to a hospital on another line. I knew you would rather ride in the goods-car, so I sent her off in the regular car.”

It was nearing four o’clock when Hughes showed me my room. As he said good night he lingered at the threshold as if anxious to say something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Say, old man, I hate like the deuce to say it—you are my guest and all that, you know—but we are in bad times now. You won’t mind putting your revolver within easy reach, will you?”

I laughed and assured him I was quite accustomed to that in Russia.

But Hughes was obviously chagrined that he had to make the request.

“The house is guarded,” he added, “and everything will probably be all right, but we have to be prepared for anything, you know. Good night.”

Mr. Medhurst and I got up late next morning, and as we lingered over a delicious English breakfast, eating slice after slice of toast and marmalade, and drinking far more tea than usual, because it was English breakfast tea, which is a rarity in Russia, he told me the romance of Yusofka.

Fifty years ago Russia was almost completely given over to peasant life, the simple wants of the people being supplied by home industries, which are still maintained. Foreign prospectors were the first to realize the vast possibilities of Russia’s natural resources and to begin to prove them. The pioneer among these foreigners was one John Hughes, a Welshman, who discovered in the government of Yekaterinoslaff, near the Sea of Azov, rich deposits of iron and coal. Hughes was the hard-headed son of a blacksmith who stubbornly fought his way upward until he had become a master shipbuilder. He knew all about iron, and much about steel. He knew, too, that in an undeveloped country like Russia, it would be impracticable to utilize to advantage on any large scale the richest iron deposits, if coal had to be transported. After a good deal of searching he found both minerals in juxtaposition in south Russia. Coal-mining was then so new a thing to Russia that there was no coal-mining caste. It had to be created. John Hughes sent to Wales for a number of tried Welsh miners, who came out with their families and set up a British industrial community. The idea of Hughes was to make his British men foremen, as soon as possible, in order to establish an industrial class among Russian workmen.

Simultaneously with the inauguration of this enterprise, Russia began to build thousands of miles of railroads, and to encourage the foreign investor, subsidized the Company in the form of advance orders of such magnitude that the New Russia Company, as it was called, in a few years was employing twelve thousand workmen and paying an annual dividend of over twenty per cent. The British workmen, to-day, are all foremen and managers. The workmen are all Russians.

Thus the iron- and steel-workers and the coal-miners came into existence in Russia. Other companies, especially under French and Belgian initiative, followed John Hughes and his New Russia Company into the field.

The English employers introduced British housing conditions, and British systems so that the Russians early had the advantage of Western methods. Wages were low, and still are, because throughout the country wages are low. Sporadic strikes have occurred; but there are no trade unions as yet. It seems to have been the policy of the foreign companies to pay their workmen, who have come out to Russia from abroad, more than the same men would have received at home, but to pay the Russian workmen the current wages of the country.

The name Yusofka is a corruption of Hughesofka, from John Hughes. Mr. Arthur Hughes, my host, the grandson of old John Hughes, was the only member of the family left at the works of the New Russia Company to deal with the men and look after the vast and valuable properties, the holdings of the Company.

There is always a deal of romance about engineers who carry civilization into the wilderness, who wrest earth’s treasures from remote plains and unexplored mountains, whether in Mexico or the Andes, South Africa or interior Russia. My experience has been that these men are always workaday fellows who resent it when the picturesque and the heroic side of their lives is mentioned; and Hughes was no exception. A rich man, the son of a now wealthy family, educated at a leading English technical school, and in the Carnegie works in Pittsburg, an expert in the Bessemer process, a cultivated English gentleman in thought, instincts, manner and speech; only thirty; master of twelve thousand restless, wretched workmen, in a foreign country in time of revolution and general lawlessness, and his life constantly threatened; once, when he rescued a young Jewish girl from drunken Cossacks; again, when he recklessly interfered to save a lot of stupid workmen from a Black Hundred entanglement—such is Hughes. He lives absolutely alone, and coolly attends to business day after day, striving to maintain the precedence of his Company over all others in Russia, through the merit and quality of the goods produced.

After a day or two I began to understand what Mr. Medhurst meant when he urged me to remain at Yusofka a fortnight.

“Hughes will be delighted,” he said, “to have some one to whom he can talk in his own tongue—and, besides, it makes another gun in the house.”

As it turned out I remained ten days. During that time Hughes did everything a perfect and generous host could do, not only in regard to helping me to all of the information I wanted concerning the lives of the workmen, but also to make my visit happy. Late afternoons we would ride out over the rolling steppe, straight away as the crow flies, and come back by the compass when night began to fall. Evenings I was initiated into the intricacies of chess, which I had never before had the boldness to approach.

The great industrial section of Russia corresponding to the “black country” of England, is in the provinces of the south, chiefly about Yekaterinoslaff. Here are the deepest coal-pits, the largest factories and forges, the richest iron-mines. Here, across the miles of intervening steppe, between the villages and towns, are always visible the towering stacks of “works.” The nights are made fascinating by the clouds of fire that ever and anon belch starward from the mighty furnaces which melt the ore to fluid, and where are fashioned the rails destined to join East with West and North with South, and the girders which shall span the great rivers. The steppe is a place of vast silence. The widest expanses of the world’s oceans are not lonelier. But where the work and industry of man have possessed the steppes, claimed the earth and all that lies beneath the fields of waving grain, reared structures of stone and metal for the molding and fashioning of civilization’s necessities from these crude riches, silence there is none, neither night nor day. The summer winds which gently bow the corn on the encircling fields are ladened with the sounds of mighty hammer-strokes, grinding wheels, the shrieks of whistles and the labored puffing of the engines. Over the steppe broods the mystic spell of limitless nature. Over the industrial plains, which are the steppe in transition, is the palpable heart-beat of the workaday world. And the men whose labor is the soul of these great industries are themselves like the country, of the past and of the future. Few have permanently left the soil. The men who swelter in the glare and blinding heat of the blast furnaces, who turn the cooling metal in the rolling-mills, pause in their labor and see in the distance a hut of stone and mud with a roof of thatch, and about it a farm—a farm too small and too poor to support them and their families—yet to them home. The Russian workman is an industrian through necessity. Some there are, of course, who have tired of this dual existence and have relinquished the farm land. As time goes on more and more will do this. The “working-class” will cease to be the inert mass it is to-day, and will become a potent factor in the country. But to-day this working-class is largely composed of men who work in the mills and factories while their families work the land, or rent their land, or who hire cheap labor for their land, or who themselves drop their tools, lay by their picks and drills, quit the furnace and the forge at spring-and harvest-time, and return to the open to sow and to reap.

Russian workers, therefore, are workmen in the making, or at best, men not yet weaned from the soil, workmen of the first generation, with the blood and traditions and even the property of the peasant.

The phrase “Russian Workman” is really an anomaly. The Russian workman, properly so-called, is a development of the future. Hewers of wood there are in Russia, and drawers of water, but professional “workmen,” in the technical English sense, referring to the men whose entire lives are spent in the factories and workshops, are few. Industries there are a-plenty: factories, foundries, mines and workshops; but a great part of the men found in them are representative of a transition period, a hybrid production, part peasant, part artisan. Serfdom in Russia was a recognized institution until but yesterday, as it were, and to-day eighty per cent. of the population are people of the land—tillers of soil, guardians of cattle; and the man with the hoe is not technically a workman.

Time has about the same value to the Russian workman that it has to the Russian at large—ceachass, directly—in an hour or two, when we get round to it! The Russian workman’s day is twelve hours long. But the number of holidays, Church and State, are appalling to a European. At Easter, for example, there are ten days marked in red on Russian calendars. If a factory runs every working-day in the year, that means two hundred and twenty days; but there are few workmen who pretend to work even every working-day. Yet he must so regulate his living as to have enough reserve from his wages to carry him through the holidays. This is simplified for him by the regulations of the Church which prescribes long and stringent fasts. At these times the expenditure for food is reduced to a minimum; likewise the efficiency and productivity of the man. It is no uncommon thing for workmen of massive frame and naturally strong physique to faint from exhaustion in the mills, during the long fasts. Energy, crispness of action, interest in the work, are all impossible under such conditions.

The working-day begins at six o’clock. It is the practice to begin on an absolutely empty stomach—not even a glass of tea. At half-past-eight there is a half hour for “breakfast,” which usually consists of tea and pirogki—a kind of warm bread with chopped meat in the center, or fish. From nine o’clock till one there is work without intermission, then dinner. The usual dinner is a kind of soup called “stchi” or “borsch.” This is more of a stew than a soup, for it contains chopped cabbage, carrots and other vegetables, and a chunk of boiled meat. The soup is gulped down first, then the meat. Sweets are only included on holidays. This must suffice until six o’clock when the day’s work is done and the workman returns to his hovel—be it farmhouse or lodging—and sits alone with his steaming samovar drinking many glasses of tea, and for solid food meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes, and black bread. Tea is always taken from a glass, and without milk or lemon. Nor is the workman extravagant as to sweetening his tea by dropping several pieces of sugar into every glass he drinks. Russian sugar is made very hard, and on account of the excise is three times as costly as in neighboring countries. The workman, like the peasant, places one hard lump between his teeth and strains his tea through it. Thus one small lump answers for a glass.

The cost of living is not particularly low in Russia, it is the standard of living that is low. An English workman could not live on the same fare as the Russian workman, and an American workman would not even try. The actual prices of food-stuffs and rentals are lower than in England, much lower than in America, but wages are proportionately lower, and the variety of foods in the diet of the Russian workman is much less than of the English or American workman.[21]

The wages of a common laborer are seventy-five copecks, or thirty-five cents a day. Men of the type who attend the blast furnaces in the metal works average sixty-five cents a day, while the rollers, who are accounted skilled workmen and are paid by the month, receive one hundred and twenty-five rubles or sixty-three dollars. These, however, are only the very best men. The second men, who make up the majority, receive from twenty-five to thirty dollars monthly. Coal-miners are sometimes paid according to the amount of work they do, and sometimes by the day—as in England and America—but their total income either way, does not amount to more than fifteen or twenty dollars a month. The

rank and file of laborers do not average above twenty dollars a month. These figures all refer to the best paid industries.

The first expenditure is for house rent. The common price for an ordinary workman’s house is four rubles, or two dollars a month. This includes two rooms and a kitchen—sometimes a cellar—frequently an outside pantry which not uncommonly contains a stove in order that in the summer months, when the heat is great, the cooking may be done outside of the main house.

Workmen’s houses in industrial Russia are of three general types. First, the houses built and owned by the companies and rented to the men, or loaned to them without cost. Second, the average workman’s house, and third, the artel, or lodging for single men.

The Company house is the poorest type. The occupants of these houses are only the poorest workmen. There are unskilled artisans in every mill and factory whose wages are small, so the Companies make up for this (in small part) by giving them the rental. These houses, if rented, would bring about one dollar or one dollar and a half per month.

One tenth of the wages goes for house rent. This is so general that it may be stated dogmatically. Men living in free houses make from ten to fifteen dollars a month. Men living in the four-ruble houses average forty rubles, or twenty to twenty-five dollars a month.

The skilled men are so few that they occupy the better type of house such as usually is occupied by foremen.

The artel, or lodging-house, is a curious institution common throughout Russia. From twelve to sixteen single men live together in specially-built houses consisting of one large, common sleeping-room, a common kitchen and eating-room, and a small ante-room for the caretaker. The caretaker is usually an old woman. She scrubs the floors, does all the chores, and acts in every capacity. The living is of the crudest and cheapest. Twelve rubles, or six dollars a month is the common price paid by each lodger. This includes food. One ruble or fifty cents additional is paid for the rent. The caretaker gets the difference between expenditures for the food and supplies and the total amount paid by the men. The sleeping accommodations are very simple. In some artels there are plank platforms one foot to eighteen inches from the floor, and on these the men lie like packed sardines; in others, each man has a crude bed. There is a stove at one end of the room, and on the walls usually colored pictures—chromos—the only decoration save the ever present icon in the corner near the ceiling.

The morality of the Russian workman is mainly negative. Religion is everywhere, or, at least, ecclesiasticism. But what religion is, or means in Russia, is hard to determine. Church-going is general. The most striking building in each village and town is the church. The clatter and din of church-bells breaks out at any hour. Within are invariably garish decorations of gilt and gold. The workmen, like the peasants, always remove their hats and cross themselves many times when passing a church, and when they enter they have every appearance of piety and devotion. Russian churches do not have pews or seats: the congregation stands, or individuals (at their own will and pleasure, so far as I could discover) kneel and pray, and bow forward until their foreheads rest upon the paved floor. I have seen a cab-driver asleep upon the box of his cab when hit upon the back by a companion, awake startled, and instantly, as by instinct, whip off his hat and cross himself. On every hand are evidences of ecclesiastical power and influence. And yet—what does it stand for? One is not shocked or surprised to find a drunken priest on the street. The most devout drink to excess at stated times. They pillage, plunder and steal goods and chattels and other men’s wives. So far as one can judge religion has no grip whatever upon the hearts of the people, no influence on their conduct of life. At the same time the forms of the church are scrupulously maintained. The fasts are adhered to to the physical detriment of the people, and no house is without its icon. But there is no commandment that is not lightly broken.

It would be wrong, however, to convey the impression that the Russian workman is a drunkard. He is not. He drinks at certain stated times only, usually when he draws his pay. Drink does not seriously interfere with business in Russian industrial centers. There are drunkards in every community in Russia, as in most countries, but on the whole the per capita consumption of alcohol among the workmen is not great and with the exception of the one day in the month which follows the pay-day the workmen are not given to drunkenness; Sundays and holidays might be added.

Morality is a totally different question. A gentleman who for thirty years has been the paymaster of one of the largest “works” in Russia, went so far as to say to me: “Morality is unknown among Russian workmen.” In this respect industrial Russia to-day is not unlike industrial England immediately after the industrial revolution. The breaking-up of the homes and emigration have always resulted in a lowering of ethical and moral standards.

Compared with the English and American workman the Russian is inferior. Physically he should be capable of greater endurance and effort, for his frame is large and heavy, but weakened by his insufficient diet, and too rigid adherence to the fasts prescribed by the church, he has so undermined his strength, and so reduced his capacity, that in the run of months and years he is worth only one third of an English workman, and not more than one fourth of an American. “A Russian looks a long time at his work before he begins,” said a mine foreman to me. Figures furnished me by superintendents and employers demonstrated that the average English workman can do the work of three Russians. The Russian is listless. He does not understand the reason for hurry. To-morrow is as good as to-day. He has not been trained by discipline, nor encouraged by the reward which should accrue to the thrifty and the pushing. Looked at critically he is good raw material—but very raw and very crude. Like the country at large, the Russian workman promises well under proper conditions, and if sufficient time and capital are invested in him, he will develop an adequate earning capacity. But his religion must first be tempered with intelligence. He must learn to make the best use and the most use of his naturally strong physique, and his economic condition must so alter that it will appear to him worth his while to devote himself with more heart to his work. He must adopt a much higher standard of living, and demand recompense for his labor that will enable him to maintain that advanced standard. Under the present system industry is not rewarded by promotion. A miner, for example, can never become a stager, nor a stager an engineer. Having once taken the examination for the lower post all further advancement is precluded. Also, the line between industrialism and peasantry must be more sharply drawn. The man who is farmer in summer and plate-roller in winter may be none the less a good farmer, but he is very much less valuable as a plate-roller. The two lines of life are parallel, but they don’t interlace.

One day I climbed into a huge metal basket and was lowered twenty-five hundred feet toward the earth’s heart. The walls of the shaft were of splendid firm masonry, great blocks of stone like granite. The engines which controlled the descent were equipped with the most modern patents for haulage, automatic brakes and indicators. At another mine I gingerly placed one leg in a small wooden affair like a nail keg, grasped a hemp rope from which the keg was suspended with one hand, and was swung out over a dark well, called a shaft, and with the other hand and the other leg (the one outside the keg) maintained an unsteady balance, and saved myself from too violent contact with the sides, as two horses jogged round a ring, unwinding a drum allowing the keg and its load to go jerkily bottomward. Here the shaft sides were of timber—crude, wooden slats interlaced after the fashion of a crib.

The former was the result of the English influence; the latter was pure Russian.

Between the Russian miner and the French, Belgian, or British miner is this difference: the Russian has not the blood of coal-miners in his veins, nor the traditions of underground workers handed down to him from preceding generations. Whereas the others are generally miners by tradition and breeding, the Russian is really a peasant driven from his land to seek a living where he can find it. Mining is a casual choice with him, he would as lief be in the rolling-mill, or tending one of the coke-ovens.

This system of labor which permits workmen to spend part of the year on their farms and part in the mines and mills, is a symptom of Russia’s industrial revolution. The workers who do this are called “the go-aways,” and make up a large percentage of the workmen in the industrial districts of south Russia, with the result that they are poor agriculturists and second-rate workers. Slowly the system will pass, and industrial towns composed of a permanent population be established. The Russian peasant has been on the land so long that he has little ambition to leave it. When the land is worked out, exhausted, and the annual harvest is no longer sufficient to keep the souls and bodies of his family together, he goes off to the towns. The vast area of European Russia given solely to agriculture, makes it often necessary for the peasant to travel far to find winter employment. Thus north Russians have a journey of fifteen hundred, or two thousand miles to the south Russian mines and factories. This is a goodly distance for a peasant. When harvest-time comes year after year, the worker more and more shrinks from going back to his patch of land to reap the meager harvest, and each year some give up the thought and remain at their work. Many more, however, have a bred-in-the-bone love for the soil, and with a political revolution in the atmosphere, with a general cry from one end of the empire to the other of “Land—Land,” they come up out of the black depths of the coal-pits and back to their dessiatines in the hope that one day other dessiatines will be given them, and they may leave their proletarian life forever. Naturally, this condition does not produce miners or other workers of the best type, and hence the coal-miners of the Donitz basin do not compare favorably with the coal-miners of England or America.

One of the great drawbacks to the progress of the

coal industry among Russians, is the Russian engineer. Russian law provides that the chief engineer at each colliery shall be a Russian, or at least, shall possess a Russian certificate, which amounts to the same thing. There seems to be universal agreement that the Russian mining engineer is rarely a practical man. Trained in a mediocre technological school he comes to a colliery resplendent in a long coat with silver buttons and gold insignia. This coat rarely comes off. A Russian engineer never goes down into a pit if he can avoid doing so. I can testify that I usually saw them strutting about above ground, and always wearing their good clothes—looking much more like officers on parade than practical engineers. The feeling against these dressed-up theoreticians is very strong among pit-foremen, managers, and all practical miners.

If a coal-miner becomes expert in any particular line of work he may become a section-boss, but as for working up from the ranks, it is unheard of, and impossible, according to present laws. If a man desires to become a manager he must make up his mind to this before going into the mines at all, then pass a manager’s examination, after which he may never occupy any other post.

The Russian coal-miner, like most Russian workmen, persists in clinging to the inherited idea that the land is where man belongs, that the land is for the people, and his work in the mines is merely to supply him with food and raiment till the people shall come into possession of the land, when he will lay down his tools and go back to the soil. This is the prime reason for his backwardness.

The Russian coal-miner is naturally careless and lackadaisical. Time is meaningless to him. He lacks caution in his work, and handles explosives as if they were minerals as harmless as coal. The government, understanding this characteristic, largely removes responsibility from the workman and places it upon the employer by granting high compensation in cases of accident. The employer, therefore, takes extraordinary precautions through his managers. This system is by no means a bad one, for in presupposing the ignorance and carelessness of undisciplined workmen, the chance for accident is reduced to a minimum.

The government also protects the children; no boy may be employed at manual labor, or for a full day, until he has attained his fifteenth year. At the age of thirteen a boy may go into an office for half-days. To encourage schooling a boy who passes the third grade in the common schools is excused from sixteen months’ soldiering. These are comparatively recent regulations, copied, I believe, from Germany. There is no gainsaying their value and reasonableness. That such wise laws as these should be found in connection with an industry where there are such absurd restrictions as, for instance, the preventing of practical miners from becoming superiors, is typically Russian.

Not political revolution alone threatens Russia to-day. Industrially, there is every symptom of the disorganization which precedes an industrial revolution. I found Russian workmen agitating armed revolt because they wanted more land! That is the slogan of the peasants. The working-men stand for supporting the peasants in this, in order, as some of them expressed it, that they may quit the industries, and return to the land. So long as workmen look upon their work as a temporary expediency, Russia will not develop a strong working-class. But this is only incident to the transition. Revolution, armed or unarmed, must evolve change, and with the wider liberties and scope for individual development which Russia soon will have, the workmen will have opportunities to develop their own industries. For the present the prime thing is change, immediate and radical change. It matters not what the shibboleth so long as it leads to this.

Thus far the workmen have not been allowed to consider themselves as a class—any form of organization is prohibited by the government. Any effort toward “industrial betterment,” improved conditions, or any of the reforms which are common movements in England and America, are unheard of and unknown in Russia. The wonder is that the Russian workman is as good as he is under existing conditions. Given freedom of belief, freedom from ecclesiastic superstition, freedom from civil slavery—freedom of organization, and the Russian workman will develop a vista leading to his own better day.

The tenth day of my stay in Yusofka I was called back to Moscow by telegram. The call was urgent so I determined to catch a train from a station some fourteen miles away, which left just at dawn. Hughes himself put me into the same barouche that had brought Mr. Medhurst and me to the home I now left with genuine regret, and drawn by the same black Orloffs.

“I’m sending two trusted men with you,” Hughes said, as I gripped his hand in farewell; “both are well armed.” And we rolled out of the gate and into the cool night where furnace fires belched flaring flames above near and far horizons, and where the rattle of mineshaft wheels and cars intruded upon the stillness which properly is the birthright of night, but here is unknown.

CHAPTER XXI

TOLSTOI—ODESSA—CONSTANTINOPLE

The year had turned November when this invitation came, and I was already looking forward to quitting the land of struggle and chaos. Tula, the town of Tolstoi’s home is almost the exact center of European Russia, and is reached from Moscow. “Yasnaya Poliana,” Tolstoi’s house, is located something over two hours’ drive from Tula station. Yasnaya Poliana, that is to say, “Pleasant Clearing in the Woods,” and never did the home of the prophet seem more fittingly named than now, when confusion and chaos roll unchanneled from the Baltic eastward, from European frontiers northward, covering an empire. Tolstoi looks across the seas of tumult, his hoary head towering above the wreckage, his superbly discerning vision penetrating a beyond still hid from the masses of his countrymen. And it is also true that the elements of to-day are as clear before him as before other men. He sees them all: an incompetent government, a struggling but thus far incapable revolution, twenty-seven millions of starving peasants, a disloyal navy, an untrustworthy army, a paper constitution and a reactionary régime. All these things he sees, views them calmly, and picks out a clear line of progress that leads to a goal where all of the black road will be justified. Of him, surely, is it true, “he has a faith that meets a thousand cheats, yet drops no jot of faith.” Tolstoi alone among Russians to-day is able to see his country’s plight in perspective.

Snow softly blanketed the earth and coated the bare trees of Great Russia when I said farewell to St. Petersburg and Moscow and made toward the center of the country to the station called Tula. A simple muzhik with a hand-made sledge, scarcely higher off the ground than a sled, offered to drive me out to the home where I was to be a guest, adjoining the count’s place. The horse did not look any too robust for the trip but the yamschik [peasant driver] assured me that the horse was the best to be had, and strong enough to accomplish the distance. As soon as we had left the streets of the town and struck the open country the man opened a friendly conversation. He began by telling me he had only recently come back from Manchuria, where he had served all through the war. It was evident that he had not enjoyed the service particularly and when I sympathized with him he told me how, after the first battle, he and seven of his companions held a secret council. They were all agreed that war was a bad job. In the first place not one of them knew just why they were fighting, and the idea of shooting at people whom they did not know, and in return being shot at, appeared to them as wrong. At the same time the government and their officers made them do these things. One soldier, from Tula, suggested writing to Tolstoi. A letter was indited and sent to Yasnaya Poliana. In the course of time these soldiers received their answer, in which Tolstoi told them that he believed all war was wrong, that the army had no business in Manchuria, and that if the consciences of the soldiers troubled them they should not shoot. “After that,” continued my driver, “we always knew what to do. We knew in our hearts that it was wrong to fight under such circumstances. We marched into battle because we had to, but after a few minutes our officers would all disappear, then we all ran away. We ran every time afterward.”

I told this story to a Red Cross nurse later for the humor of it. She laughingly said she was sure it was literally true, because one night after the battle of Mukden, a young captain was brought into her ward with an injured head. His wounds were not serious and shortly after they had been bandaged the officer began to laugh loudly. She went over to him and asked what amused him so greatly.

“The way I was wounded,” he replied. “Our regiment had not been long exposed to the fire when I decided it was too hot for comfort. I looked all about for some place of shelter. At last I espied a small gully or ravine, so suddenly running toward it I leaped in—only to find my general and my colonel there before me! Well—there wasn’t room for all three of us, so we began to nudge and push each other, for none wanted to get into the open again. Finally the general said to me: ‘Captain, you are not showing becoming deference to your superior officers, sir.’ At that I had to crawl out. As I did so a shell exploded near by and a piece of it hit me in the forehead causing my wound!”

The second night after my arrival at the house where I was a guest I was taken over to Yasnaya Poliana. Tolstoi had been informed of my presence in the neighborhood, and had graciously suggested to my friend that she bring me to see him. The fast-falling, late autumn night was settling over the snow-fields and silver woods as we climbed the knoll upon which Yasnaya Poliana house stands. In summer the place must have a fascinating charm, for all the elements of a beautiful country park are there—flower-beds and wildwood, orchards, groves and arbored walks, a bit of water, fields rolling toward distant horizons, broad sky and vistas that hold one. Surmounting the knoll, a pleasant house, large enough without being grand, comfortable without pretension. At the door a black poodle barked a welcome. A man-servant helped us to unload the heavy garments we wore against the cold of a Russian November night. With not unexpected directness we were taken straight to the count’s study. There he sat—near a table-desk which was littered with piles of letters and papers. “Good evening,” he called cheerily and quite as though I were an old friend. His hands, which were extended in welcome, were warm as if the fires of his strong life and body still burned fiercely, as when he commanded men on Sebastopol bastions, ranged over the unconquered Caucasus, and hunted with the most daring of his comrades through great Russian forests. He had been horseback-riding in the afternoon, he told us. Surely few men carry the weight of seventy-eight years with more vigor.

The first words of greeting over, he began to ask about his friends in America, men whom he knows personally or by reputation. A conversation with a neighbor from one’s own home town on a chance meeting in a foreign land would scarcely have been different. There was a delightful eagerness for word-of-mouth news. Names of men in New York slipped as easily from his tongue as from one of their own circle.

Shelves of books in many languages walled the room from floor to eye level, while above hung portraits of many thinkers who have, or should have, influenced the world. Prominent among them Henry George and William Lloyd Garrison.

“Do you read Garrison?” Tolstoi asked, as my wandering eyes rested on the portrait of our own champion of liberty. “Do you read Channing, Thoreau, Emerson? I always ask Americans about those four great men. They should be read by the young men of to-day.”

A tall candle burning on the table by his right side threw its restless gleams across the old man’s rugged face, and involuntarily my mind ran incredulously over the intensely human career whose latter days are now marked by such inspiring serenity.

We could not long keep off the subject of Russia and her troubles, however, and at last I ventured to ask him what was his interpretation of the movement of things in Russia at the moment.

Tolstoi pointed to an old volume of Rousseau’s “Émile” lying on a table at the other side of the room, and asked me to bring it to him. Turning over the pages of Book IV till he found the paragraph he sought, he paused, then read very slowly and with emphasis, these sentences: “On dit qu’il falloit une révélation pour apprendre aux hommes la manière dont Dieu vouloit être servi; on assigne en préserve la diversité des cultes bizarres qu’ils ont institué, et l’on ne voit pas que cette diversité même vient de la fantaisie des révélations. Dès que les peuples se sont avisés de faire parler Dieu, chacun l’a fait parler à sa mode et lui a fait dire ce qu’il a voulu; si l’on n’eût écouté que ce que Dieu dit au cœur de l’homme, il n’y auroit jamais eu qu’une religion sur la terre.” The last sentence he read twice, and then handed the book across the table that I might absorb the passage. “That is what we have all got to learn,” he said, “to listen to the words God speaks to us in our hearts. We need no other religion or philosophy than this. We need no institution like a church. This message is for the people of America as well as for Russia, and the whole significance of the present terrible situation in Russia is that the Russian people are being brought to the point where every other channel will be closed and only by turning to God will they be able to save themselves.” In other words, Tolstoi sees, as every one in Russia must see, that the drift of things is toward an abyss, and Tolstoi reads into this tendency a deeply religious meaning; he accepts it as part of a Divine plan, and he firmly believes that the Russian people will come to look upon their situation as a call from God to discard their ancient superstitions and to inaugurate a new era in which each individual will endeavor to readjust his life into conformity with the infinite.

Tolstoi appreciates, as does every one in Russia, that the Russian liberal movement aims to effect a social revolution, and that a successful political revolt will only mark the beginning of the struggle. Tolstoi does not view this as do most Russian thinkers, however. He does not accept the accomplishment of a socialistic state as a goal at all, for he distrusts the economics of socialism, and as a philosophy he rejects socialism vehemently. “It is not a second-rate, but a hundredth-rate philosophy,” he says. “The present growth of socialism,” he went on in explanation, “is to be accounted for in precisely the same way as the present popularity of inferior literature, poetry, drama, and art. It is all part of a passing phase.”

“Monsieur Leroy Beaulieu, the French writer,” said Tolstoy, “was here not long ago, and he said to me: ‘The Russian revolution? It is for fifty years.’ That may be. But in the end—whether ten years or fifty years—a new era of righteousness will be established in Russia.”

Late in the evening we adjourned to the dining-room, where were the countess and a party of about a dozen. A more varied group one seldom meets under one roof. There was the count, strong in his faith, confident in the truth of his own philosophy of “Christian anarchism.” There was a son, who, during the Japanese War, was a patriot, a loyal subject of the Czar, and as such volunteered for service in arms and served in Manchuria. There was the eldest brother of this soldier son, a Constitutional Democrat, or middle-of-the-road-man, and next him a sister who is married to a man who is an “Octoberist,” a conservative deputy to the first Duma, and she shares her husband’s political opinions. Also there was a disciple of Count Tolstoi, who believes not in war or parliaments at all; and a Social Revolutionist, who believes ardently in revolution and even in terrorism. Each was true to his own convictions and perfectly outspoken. When the count had drunk his glass of tea, little heeding the babel of conversation around the board, he pushed back his chair and for several moments slowly paced the room. The huge dining-room, warm with hospitality, afforded a striking picture that night. Against the high, dark walls stood out several life-size oil portraits. In one corner a grand piano, near it a table on which were strewn a pack of cards, and opposite a cozy-corner. In the center of the room, the long dining-table around which were gathered the company; at one end a steaming samovar. Slowly, back and forth, paced the count, now in the shadow, now in the light, his shaggy gray beard against his dark-blue peasant blouse. So stalwart, so vigorous, so keen to all things he seemed. Above all, so serene in spirit; for he glories in the present dark hour of his country, believing it harbingers the approach of dawn—the awakening of the Russian people to a consciousness of a grander destiny than they have dreamed of before, when as true sons of God they shall realize that heaven of which the dogmatic preachers talk, only not in a distant future, but here on earth.

However often it may be true that “a prophet is without honor in his own country,” Tolstoi is honored and revered by the peasants in the villages of Tula, and his own influence throughout Russia is very great. Curiously enough, though, it is his unconscious influence which is greatest. Tolstoi, above all living men, is the apostle of “non-resistance” and “passive resistance.” But in Russia all resistance of necessity becomes active resistance. Tolstoi pamphlets on the horrors and evils of war perhaps more than any other influence have brought army service into disrepute with the people. The Russian people hold their enforced military service as one of their prime grievances, and to avoid such service every ruse and device is resorted to from bribery and perjury to open “passive resistance,” that is, stubborn refusal to carry arms. But the government views this attitude as opposed to its interests and consequently revolutionary. Refusal to bear arms in Russia is punished by imprisonment. Tolstoi told me of a peasant thus imprisoned who replied to the court that sentenced him: “Very well, imprison me. I shall pray for you and my unhappy country, whose rulers make men do evil.” The beginnings of resistance have been inspired by Tolstoi’s “peaceful” and “Christian” writings in thousands of cases, and eventually fruited in revolutionaryism and insurrection. This unconscious influence, which Tolstoi has exerted during the last decade, and more especially during the last two years, is enormous. Peasants in every section of Russia knew more or less about Tolstoi, and while not professing to be “Tolstoians,” nevertheless admit that the beginning of their criticism of the government, and the first inspiration to trust to their own thinking, came from one or another of Tolstoi’s writings. Doubtless there are thousands of people all over the world who owe, even if they do not recognize, a like debt to this great, restive spirit, the dynamic of whose life has been both innate and conscious moral earnestness. A moral leader of the force and caliber of Tolstoi can not fail to impress a generation, and this is Tolstoi’s contribution to life and the world: he has quickened men to thought and action, and he has pointed a goal and standard above all others in the God which dwells within each and every human being.

Upon leaving Tula I went south to the Crimea. On the train I read Tolstoi’s “Sebastopol Sketches,” which contain about the most graphic descriptions of war ever written. Curiously enough the season of the year when I first saw Sebastopol was the same as Tolstoi describes upon his arrival in the besieged city in 1854. During all my stay there I could not get away from the remarkable coincidental similarity in conditions—December, 1854, and December, 1906. To be sure, Sebastopol was not besieged by alien foes from without, but it was besieged by revolutionists from within. This, like most ports and all naval stations, is a revolutionary stronghold. Only the day before my arrival an admiral or port officer had been assassinated. Sentinels patrolled the streets at intervals of one hundred feet. The Hotel Kist was guarded. Small bodies of troops were moving in different parts of the city, and when the early morning mist lifted, a half-dozen warships were revealed lying at anchor. For several hours during the forenoon large forces of cavalry and light artillery were kept manœuvering in the plain across the narrow strip of water from the pristan. It might just as well have been a besieged city. Save for the lack of wounded and dead men, the outward aspects of the town were every whit as warlike, and everywhere were the signs of martial law.

These indications of unrest and readiness for trouble did not deter me from visiting Balaklava and lovely Yalta, or interesting Bakhtchi-Sarai, the old Crimean Tartar capital, and Tchoufout-Kali, the two thousand-year old Karaite[22] stronghold. After these visits I turned toward Odessa, which I reached via Eupatoria.

Odessa being one third a Jewish city has long been a city of trouble—not so much because of the Jews as on account of the powerful Black Hundred organization made up of water-front laborers and the lowest elements of a special city, who, under governmental tutelage, from time to time break loose upon the Jews. Incipient and real massacres are apt to break out there any time. The governor-general, Kaulbars, is a notorious reactionary, and encourages every form of repression.

I had studied the Jewish question in many other places, and in Odessa as in Warsaw, Vilna, and other Jewish centers, I became convinced that the Russian government, by its extraordinarily blind and stupid policy, has itself created the Jewish problem. If the 5,000,000 Jews who are now in Russia were scattered among the 140,000,000 people of the Russian empire, they would scarcely be noticed. But Russia chose the arbitrary part and closed to the Jews all but a tiny strip of the empire. In only nine governments and in Poland many Jews live, and these are the districts which constitute “the pale”—South Russia, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. Having corralled all the Jews over whom it has jurisdiction, the Russian government then proceeded to enact a long series of special, discriminative laws, and to inaugurate special Jewish taxes.

Stripped of every right and privilege of citizenship and manhood save one—the right to pay taxes—the Jews of Russia have had no other recourse than to develop their mental powers. This they have done most creditably under circumstances quite as adverse as learning arithmetic from a borrowed text-book, by the light of a rail fire during the hours between the end of the workday and sleep time. And now, because he has given himself devotedly up to the one thing left him and has been successful, he is feared. Whatever may have been the original motives of the czars in the restrictions they laid upon the Jews, the present attitude of Jew-baiting Russians is based upon jealous fear.

One thing all observers mark—outspoken bitterness against the Jews on the part of peasants flourishes in the parts where the Jews are not. Within the pale most often does one find champions of the Jew. Nearly every telegraph correspondent for the foreign press who hastened to Bielostok at the time of the massacre commented on the testimony of the townspeople that (to quote one of them) “the Jews and Christians had always lived together like brothers.” The Jew is much more apt to be suspicious of the Christian than is the non-Jew to nourish ill-will against the Jews whom he comes into frequent contact with. If it is not literally true that to know is to love, it at least may be said that to know is to tolerate, with regard to the Jews in Russia. The persecution of the Jews in Russia originates with official Russia, and the bitterness which their weakness and fears inspire is passed on to the people through the government’s agents—often the priests—through the government press, and through the scapegoat, underling officials who are immediately above the actual perpetrators of the dire deeds, and below the higher officials who are morally responsible.

The massacre of Bielostok was executed as a diabolical and fantastic orgy by the police and the soldiers. They deliberately shot little children. They ravished, then murdered, young girls, they tortured men by the wildest and most excruciating devices. And the police and soldiers, incidentally, looted Jewish shops and carried away pockets full of watches from jewelers, and cash when they could get it.

The governor of the district was removed, but not in disgrace. The actual perpetrators of these deeds still administer the “law” in Bielostok. The children and the families of the murdered see them every time they go out. I saw them when I was there. They walked about with heads in the air as if they had done a noble thing and were worthy, like war-heroes. And the story of Bielostok is practically the very same as the story of Gomel, of Kishineff and Odessa, save that in Odessa there is a stronger Black Hundred element of “hooligans” and rowdies, who, for a pittance, are glad to lend themselves to the unscrupulous and murderous police.

Such conditions drive the older and weaker Jews to America, and the more spirited of the younger generation to revolution. It is the height of absurdity for the Russian government to excuse its Jewish oppression on the ground that the Jews are revolutionary. By nature and by tradition they are the opposite of aggressive and militant. They are revolutionary because the Russian government is oppressive, and because they know no other course.

The Russian Jew is docile, domestically inclined, and peace-loving naturally, but when exasperated beyond endurance he becomes a daring antagonist. Surely it is no reflection against the Jewish race that the stronger men and women resent the endless insults that Russia heaps upon them. Even the passport of a Jew is differentiated. Fifteen thousand Jews gave up their lives in Manchuria during the course of the late inglorious war, in which they had no interest and for which they had no sympathy. Fifteen thousand more were wounded in the same ignominious cause. And yet Manchuria remains closed to the Jews as a place of settlement. Thirty thousand Jewish victims in one war! Yet no Jew may