Chapter VIII: Part 8

While this feudal system applies in general to the whole _eimuck_, in Urga the Gigin has a unique position. The city is a great monastery, practically all of the permanent native population of fifteen thousand being priests. The laymen who are there are mostly pilgrims, or dependents upon the Church. Over these the Gigin is master, so that Urga is known as “The Holy Living God’s Encampment.”

Over the Russians and the Buriat tribesmen, the Chinese have no actual sway, and from them they collect no taxes. The Russian consul is dictator to this little flock; and behind his stockade, where the tricolor waves, rally the Orthodox in times of danger.

Across from the _Zinzin’s_ doorway is a spiked stockade. Inside, where they have been thrust through a hole just big enough for a man’s body, are the miserable criminals. In the big pit dug with their naked hands, the wretches cower, shelterless, under the terrible cold of winter. They live or die there, sometimes fed by the charity of Mongols, sometimes forgotten, sometimes purchasing miserable fragments of offal with the unstolen remnants of the prison allowance. Few waste sympathy on the inmates. The low level of existence of those outside makes the place perhaps less terrible than it would be to people who had known other conditions. It is a grim Chinese jest, this loathsome prison for those who have stolen bread in the market-place, set opposite the palace of the grafting governor who has filched the tribute of Tu-she-tu.

From the Chinese city now, there begins to come the distant throb of drums and clash of cymbals. Three gorgeous Mongols gallop past in their splendid free-reined horsemanship. A sentry stalks to the door of the stockaded prison, and looks toward the gray walls and temples of Maimachen. The procession of the New Moon is to pass to-day.

You leap onto your little Mongol riding-pony, and spurring him into a gallop, hasten along the way to the Chinese city. He tears down the broad road. The resplendent trotting horsemen take the pace as a challenge, and yell joyfully for a race as their whips come down on their own horses’ flanks. Mongol girls walking hand in hand along the highway scatter and call out as the riders clatter by. It is contagious. Soon a score of riders are shouting, shaking bridles, and lashing ponies, and it is a cavalcade of racers that gallops up to the gate of Maimachen.

How different is this Chinese settlement from Mongol Urga! It is a magnified replica of the city at the frontiers. Instead of the straggly avenues a hundred yards broad, with cañon-like alleys flanked by high mud walls, all the streets are so narrow that two strides cross them. They are lined with miniature booths. Through the bars of their paper-paned windows one sees the little delicately-tinted pictures of pagodas and of Chinese girls, in quaint sweeping outlines. Red and black and gold, the New Year placards flame on every post and wall. Lanterns are hung before the gateways; green saplings stand sentinel by the doors; and in the unshuttered compounds innumerable lines of gaudy banners are seen, strung from side to side across the courtyards. From the houses come from time to time a thrumming and a picking of strings in minor music, broken by an occasional clang of cymbals or a drone of beaten drums. You pass a temple of marvelously carved wood, wrought into curves and flowers and arabesques, with eaves turning out into open-mouthed dragons. Everything is brilliant in paint and gilt--a blazing kaleidoscope of color.

In a friendly courtyard the horses are tied, and you walk into the teeming streets. All the Chinese of Maimachen and half the Mongols of Urga have come out to-day. Here is a little shifty-eyed Chinese clerk, in his low shoes, with white soles several inches thick, his white stockings, tied at the ankle, showing below the baggy trousers.

Here is a young Mongol lama, who hails you gleefully with a Russian word which he has learned from a Buriat, and points out where the procession will emerge. A Mongol woman passes, gorgeously dressed in flowered yellow silk, with red, sable-cuffed sleeves so long as nearly to touch the ground, and her head cuirassed with the burden of silver ornaments. She smiles at the burly Mongol camel-driver who so openly admires her.

A Chinese merchant, with red-buttoned cap, attended by a servant, is pushing through the crowd. His looks are surly; perhaps he is thinking of the whereabouts of his own establishment in this carnival.

Though the rich and wifeless Chinese may acquire Mongol companions, they cannot buy or give affection. For a poor Mongol, who has the sincerity and humanness which the Chinaman withholds, one of these Mongol concubines will either deceive her master, or, if he object too vigorously, will strip herself of his presents and go to her lover’s _gir_.

A big Celestial with a fuse comes hastily through the gateway from which the procession is to emerge. The crash of his firecrackers startles the Mongol ponies pushed close along the houses. Beneath the multi-colored gateway, next pour out a score of horsemen with pennanted spears. They ride two by two, in white coats with red letters on their breasts. Then comes a crowd of footmen, who fill the street in a torrent. The curious Mongols press to each side, and watch the procession of their alien overlords. Two ranks are robed in vivid red, and carry poles with big gold knobs. Blue-coated Chinamen, with cymbals and shrilling fifes, follow; then come more horsemen; then the great silken umbrella, and a gray-mustached dignitary on horseback,--the chief of police; next, more fifers and wand-carriers, six abreast. With fireworks and clashing music, the vivid ranks in red and blue, and yellow and gold, and green and purple, and every other conceivable combination of hues, make their way around the stockade and back again through the gated city.

The crowd seems to be trending now toward a brilliantly colored archway spanning the main street. With the Mongol holiday-makers we follow along into a cloistered courtyard flanked by peaked temple-like houses. A crowd of Chinese is pressing around some one clad in blue, who has just stepped out between the beater of a tom-tom and an artist with a big pair of cymbals. A preliminary flourish introduces the performer--a pasty-faced young Chinaman. He starts a rhythmic chant whose cadence is within a note or two of one of the old crooning Negro melodies of our South. Over and over again he chants it. A poet this is. He has conned his verses, and now comes out to sing them. He ends with a special swirl in what is evidently a very comic climax. The drum and cymbals crash out once more, and another chanter comes--this one old and feeble, with a curiously penetrating voice. He drones a long hexameter-footed epic, in which the harsh Chinese _gh_ and _wh_ sounds are not so coarsely enunciated as in the poem of the first reciter. “That is one of the old legend-singers,” you are told. It is such a ballad as Homer sang, or the Welsh bards chanted. It is the poetry and the history of the long past, the immemorial past, far before the infancy of other nations; for China keeps alive her antiquity, and in her old age never forgets.

This week there can be no buying or selling. The Moon must be honored, but visits are in order. Your friend brings you to meet a leading Chinese merchant. At the house, a grille of thick wooden bars runs down to the street level from the eaves just above one’s head. Looking through them, one can see over the little square window the most delicately-traced pictures on a white background. The panes are of paper, all save one, which is of glass, so that the owner may see if, coming down the street, any one turns and climbs the three steps into the ordinarily wide-open door of his house.

The home of our host, which is likewise his office, is finely fitted up and faultlessly clean. His light-blue silk robes are immaculate. Two servants wait at table, bringing in the best of China tea and French “petit-beurre” biscuits for our delectation. Everything is appetizing and orderly.

As we are sitting over the cups with the Chinese merchant, the boy comes to announce visitors, and two blue-robed fellow countrymen enter. One has a strip of light-blue silk laid over his two arms, which he stretches out. The host extends his own arms and receives it, then gives it back to the newcomer, who goes down on one knee and again presents it. The merchant takes it a second time and bows, this time retaining it. The two guests bend and leave the room. “New Year’s presents,” the merchant explains. Again the boy comes in and announces a guest. A Mongol messenger enters, goes down on one knee, and presents a red slip, black-lettered. “Visiting-card,” the host explains. Then, with a smile, “White, like yours, not polite.” He accepts this too. “_Ch’ou Ta-tzu!_” (the dirty Tatar!) he says as the latter leaves.

The calls continue, and our visit. The host is charming, cultured, educated; he speaks English well, and lacks in no attention. But you wonder if, when you leave, he is not going to murmur about you, “Yong-kwei-tsz!” (foreign devil!)

Throughout all intercourse with these Chinese, one has always the uneasy consciousness that one is doubtless, as with the card, unwittingly offending. There are three hundred rules of ceremony, three thousand formulæ of behavior, regulated by a classic tradition. The ritual is so drilled into the Chinese as to become instinctive. Celestial breeding would dictate that the little formalism which precedes a rubber, “May I play to hearts, if you please?” be stretched to cover every action of life. The left, not the right, is the place of honor, and to enter a room facing wrongly is a slight. An irregular method of folding a red New-Year’s card, and the failure in writing to raise one character above the level of the rest, are breaches of etiquette.

For our race there is always felt, behind the soul-mask of Chinese eyes, a contempt. The kindness of our host to-day is unfailing. Yet we are not at ease or sure of the ground. Errors, condoned to keep face, are often inwardly resented. If you put your hat on the Mongol’s altar, everybody in the hut will yell out for you to take it off. When you remove it, they will nod understandingly as the interpreter explains that the ignorant foreigner transgressed inadvertently. Forthwith all is forgotten in an enthusiastic discussion of the last case of botts among the horses. But with these Chinese one can never tell if, by taking a chop-stick between the wrong fingers, one has not intimated that the host’s grandfather was a cross-eyed coolie soldier. No one will challenge or set a man right, but the breach will be silently resented, though the tea continues to be smilingly offered.

The old-time Chinese dealers at Urga grew enormously wealthy in the tea-trade to Kiahta. These have mostly gone back to China. But there are still a number of the better-class merchants whose wares are sold to the traders and by them to the Mongols. The house of Liu-Shang-Yuan claims two hundred years of establishment. The Urga people are still prosperous, for great sums in religious tribute come from all Mongolia to this Lourdes of Lamaism. There are also many Chinamen who make large profits from wool.

Of a total trade in Urga estimated at twenty-five million roubles per year, nine tenths is in the hands of Celestials. The remainder is Russian, for the Mongols are entirely without a merchant class. Of the exports, wool is the main item. Some two hundred thousand _puds_ are sent from Urga annually, four fifths of which go to the United States. While cotton cloth, cutlery, kitchen-utensils, and other European goods come down from Russia, the bulk of the imports are brought from China by caravan, through Kalgan. Silks come from Shanghai, and tea from Hankow, passing via Peking. There is trade, too, with Ulasati in western Mongolia. It is the centre of a fur and hide country which is isolated from outlets toward Russia by the high mountains, and must send caravans to Kiahta. Its communication with China is either by Urga and Kalgan, or by the caravan-route further south.

When the holiday-time is over we see more of the Chinese traders. Sitting in the shops, with one of these, and glancing out over the little counter of the sales-room, we converse as the customers come and go.

The Russian in his shop shows all he has of wares, the red and magenta cloths, the enameled kettles, the cutlery and sweetmeats. But the Chinaman wraps his goods in hieroglyphic-covered papers, and all that can be seen are rows of long-stemmed brass-bowled pipes, and an array of silver and bronze teapots on shelves at one side. Very rare things, too, our Chinese host can produce. Shanghai silks of finest texture, ten roubles the _arsheen_; jade mouthpieces for the pipes at a hundred _taels_; Hankow tea culled from the tenderest shoots. Everything is labeled and systematized in the Chinaman’s place, and he goes at once to the packet which he wishes to show.

A dozen Chinese, with bright blue silk jackets over their black surtouts, invade now the home of the merchant. The red knot on their black skull-caps and the length of their queues and finger-nails show them to be men of some importance. They take off the bright-colored ear-tabs as they enter. They are down to buy wool. To-day they visit, next week they will trade. Then all but one will sit in the outer shop, while the spokesman alone will go into the inner room and confer with the merchant. From time to time the spokesman will go back to the party and consult, till in the end the bargain is made. They will all hold to the agreement, too, whichever way the market goes. For in this the Chinese are inflexibly honest. A local Chinaman dispatched a mounted messenger the six versts to Urga, to return to us twenty kopecks which he had overcharged by a slip of his abacus-adder.

Yet the Scotch engineers saw shells in the arsenals loaded with clay when the native troops went against the Japanese. The English miners in the Province of Shan-tung have had their profits cut to nothing by the official “squeezes,” and Chinese have bought in the depreciated stocks.

The ethic code of the squeeze seems to be very nice. It is a point of honor, almost always scrupulously observed, that the first-fruits of official graft go to repaying the one who advanced the money to buy the office. A Chinaman, who could not be trusted to administer honestly a trust fund of a hundred _taels_, will repay this obligation to his backer. Thus must he keep face.

From the tax-appraiser who numbers the sheep to the civil governor who receives the lumps of silver tribute for transmission to Peking, every official gets his squeeze. They say in the _eimuck_ of Ulasati, where sables are part of the tribute, that the officials take out the best furs and put back poor skins to keep the number the same; and in Urga, that the enormously rich administration takes a Tammany third of the tribute. There has never been a viceroy yet, it is reported, who has left Mongolia poor. Yet each official plays straight with his backer, his “belly-band.” Very curious is this race, and there live few Westerners who can at all understand it.

We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home!

The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while disdained.

We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness are pushing one another about across the road.

Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the Chinese may pass.

They tramp by without a glance. Then out from the Russian barrack-gate swings a little Cossack in his great black sheepskin hat, gray tunic, clattering curved sabre, boots and spurs. He is one of the Zabaikalskaia Buriats, whom Russians call Bratskie, the brotherly people. He speaks a tongue so similar to the Mongol that all these people can understand him. They look up to him as a rich relative, fortunate in overflowing measure. For on the pilgrimages of Buddhist Buriats to Urga, their wives have told the wondering Mongol women of the sewing-machines which they have at home to stitch linings, and have allowed the visitors to peep into their mirrors. The Mongol men have admired the Buriats’ breech-loading rifle, worth six horses at current quotations. They have enviously heard tell that in Russia one pays no cow-_alba_, but the young men get a uniform and free food when they ride out to give their Cossack service to the Czar. They have listened to Buriat boasts of the warm houses of Siberia, and stacks of hay, and stored-up harvests. So Mongols smile when the Buriats come to their _girs_. They say, “Rich smooth Buriats! Great lords! Give candle, give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.”

Has not a little Zabaikalskaia Buriat reason to swagger when he starts from the Russian barrack-gate to see his lady in Urga? And should a Cossack of the Czar step aside for a Chinaman in the shadow of the Eagles? Head erect, with a look to right and then to left, hand on sabre, he swings straight down the centre of the road, and right through the Chinese soldiers. Without dispute they open a way. He chucks a not unwilling girl under the chin as he passes the Mongols, and he is good-naturedly hailed by the rest: “Hello, Cossack! Why so fast? She has gone away with a lama.” And he goes a bit faster toward Urga.

These Cossacks, terrible in war, friends and equals with the conquered in peace, are those who have held the Russian vanguard in this march to China,--the march which began when the two _hatamans_ of Moscow, commanded by Ivan the Terrible, started in 1507 on their long tramp eastward. The Cossacks it was whom Yermak led to the conquest of Sibir. Through them, in storm and stress, despite oppression and convict-gangs, with faults and failings, omissions and commissions, the advance of Russia has been the way of civilization where none could otherwise have come.

“It will mean much when a Russian railway follows our trail from Kiahta,” says Alexsimevich; and André adds: “They will all be glad when the Cossacks come to Kalgan.”

VII

RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION

New times have come to Russia with the events that have halted her armies. The Slav, looking and reaching outward, has been hurled violently back upon himself, and he turns to look inward. The stream of Slavic civilization still flows eastward. But now held back at the frontiers, its tide is rising behind the impounding barriers and is lifting on its wave the level of national life. Its scour is undermining here and there, its laden currents are depositing and filling in the interstices of the social fabric. The struggle is intensified to achieve representative government, to secure administrative reform, to relieve the distress of the peasantry. The people are in evolutionary throes and are sweeping forward in the arts of peace, in the science of government, and in the myriad lines of internal development.

The movements of empire-advance have been noted because they have been conspicuously visualized. But the economic and social growth have been only slightly regarded by our western world, intent upon great events, crises, conflicts lost and won. The seizure of a hamlet in Manchuria has obscured the founding of twenty cities in Siberia.

The continent-cleaving Siberian Railway has now revealed, in the Russian occupation of northern Asia, not an exploiting colonial enterprise, but a race-movement akin to the European invasion of our Aryan ancestors. The upward struggle of a people striving to find itself is embodied in imperial rescripts and armed revolts, in dumas and dynamite, where rival titans grapple for the throw. There is now therefore in the world a more earnest watching of this metamorphosing Russian people. What are the types of civilization, the beliefs, the manners of thought, the institutions that are to hold mastery over the largest area on the globe occupied by a single nation?

To comprehend a people and the course of its evolution one must pierce below the surface of ephemeral and contemporary incident, and probe the primitive racial elements. Russia is to-day iceberg-like. The crumbling, upper ice, honeycombed by eating waves, is exposed; but submerged and unseen is the massive blue block beneath. Because rotten surface-structures are obvious, many fail to appreciate what lies in the depths. There comes understanding for much when one sounds the ancient sources in race-history.

From the earliest times Russia lay across the path of incessant invasion from Asia. In 1224 the Mongols swept down upon the old Scythian plains. There were no mountain fastnesses in which the sparse population could defend itself. The followers of Genghis Khan, through the years that followed, destroyed town after town,--Bolgari, Suzdal, Yaroslavl, Tver,--devastated Volkynia, and Galicia, until all Russia, save Novgorod, was brought under Tatar rule. Their devastations cut off the population of whole provinces, and changed old Russian cities, such as Kiev, to hybrid towns of Asiatics. At Sarai on the Volga, for two centuries Tatar sovereigns ruled; and here from being pagan they became adherents of Islam. Russia’s foreign master was confirmed in a religion as antagonistic as was his race. To these aliens Russia gave humiliating homage and paid tribute, and from their khans her czar received permit to rule. Thus in her infancy she had a foreign race, not as servile members of the humble labor class, but in the wild, fierce scourge of conquerors.

Throughout this period many Russian princes married into noble Mongol families, and Mongol officers formed alliances with the Russian boyars. The Muscovite aristocracy had already grown into strong Oriental proclivities from contact with its southern neighbor, the Byzantine, and these became confirmed under the Tatar. One czar, at least, Boris Godunov, was of Mongol birth. Incessant war harassed the people. Alexander Nevski, of Novgorod, beat back the Swedes; but, abasing himself, he went to the Tatar khan with the tribute of a country too feeble still to resist him. By and by Russia began to rally and to strengthen her centres, Novgorod, Kiev, and Vladimir. Moscow arose--that small destiny-city where Simon the Proud, even in vassalage, dared to dream of unity and nationality, and took the title of “Prince of all the Russias.” His grandson made the first great stand against the Mongols and won in the field of Tula, which, with the fights of Alexander Nevski, gives to chroniclers and bards their early Russian ballads, or _bilinî_. Moscow, punished cruelly, was razed almost to the ground. But the Bear was aroused and goaded into desperation. Russia reeled to her feet, and for nearly a hundred years she fought, she lost, she fell; but she rose again and fought on, until at last the power of the Tatar terror was broken and the tyrant was driven over her border. Still, for a hundred years more, she was forcing back his inroads, and rescuing the winding trains of her children, toiling over the southern steppes to be sold as slaves at Kaffa. This was Russia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.

That Europe was spared this, she owes to the Russian. Through those crucial centuries when the Slav, weak, torn, anguished, beset with foes around and foes within, was standing grimly at the perilous portal of civilization, Europe, within the temple, safe by his grace, was privileged to work up into light, to cement her nationalities, to effect the liberation of her masses, and to develop her intellect into the magnificent promise of a printing-press, a people’s Bible, and a Shakespeare.

But to the brave warden of that portal there was not the sweetness and the light. For him were the seams and the scars, the mutinous passions of the strife. Long after the clouds of the Dark Ages had cleared from the face of western Europe, they hung over Russia. The Slav was back in his Dark Ages yet, heir only to a barbaric experience. Here he must start, where Europe had started nearly a thousand years before, where America, in the favor of Providence, was never to be called upon to start. For him were the memories of subjection and the blood of contention; but also, in relief, to him were the stolid patience and endurance which were to serve him so well. He groped along in the shadow until the coming of the great Peter.

But now arose a man. He, too, had dreamed the dream of empire,--vast, masterful. He set about making his dream real. He found Russia a small inland state, torn by faction, barbarian, and Oriental. Though himself the descendant of a long line of Byzantine kings, half monk, half emperor, he saw with the insight of genius, and he knew that that way did not lie greatness. Therefore fully and fiercely he broke with the past and set himself to the future.

Between him and that future stood the Strelitz. The walls of the Kremlin, and the Red Square told the doom of their barring conservatism. He warred with the Turk, he fought the Cossack, he routed the Swedes, again and again, taking whole provinces on his Baltic outlet and securing the coveted Neva. He embroiled himself with Persia, and through Baku opened a way to the Caspian. Then, with a high hand, he swept out the customs that made for Orientalism. He broke the seclusion of women, the prostrations, banished the caftan, the beard, and the flowing robes. He lifted his people bodily and violently out of their past, and set them down face-front to a new order. The Russia he had received a province, he left an empire. The Russia he had received Asiatic, he left European, and already a force in Europe. And when arose one of his own blood--a reversal--who would undo the herculean labor of this master-builder, who would give back to Sweden those priceless, wave-washed Baltic provinces, and, restoring the capital to Moscow, return to an Oriental estate, the patriot was stronger than the father, and at the price of his son’s life he bought the progress of Russia. Here in this man, who died in 1725, we can truly say that Modern Russia begins.

Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic, was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted, well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy.

With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border, with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose the autocracy.

The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the blaze of her city and her fleet.

The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”

With the accession of Alexander to the throne in 1855, on the sudden death of Nicholas, came the first effective steps toward modern institutions. The young czar, a self-declared friend of progress, raised regally the standard of reform. All Russia rose to the hopes of his idealism. Corruption in office, which had before been rampant, was crushed out by the sheer force of public opinion. Pamphlets circulated freely, uncensored. Meetings were everywhere held to discuss the varied plans of a vivified government. With a whole nation become to a degree transcendental, the Czar began his reign and his reforms.

First of all for righting, as it was first in evil, came serfdom. Summoning commissions of his ablest advisers, seeking counsel of the proprietors and their coöperation in an act of self-abnegation, the Czar proceeded to the execution of his great task. For three years every side and every phase of the problem was studied. Then at length with a fundamental law which forecovered every detail of the situation, Alexander II put his signature, February 19, 1861, to the great Ukase of Liberation.

In Russia’s past there is much to answer for before the judgment-bar, in omission and in commission. Yet, giving but justice to ruler and people, it must be allowed that the measure which freed the serfs ranks, with Magna Charta and the American Constitution, among the mightiest agencies of advance that mankind has ever known. A dependent population of nearly forty-six million souls was given liberty. The great act was accomplished peacefully, and the measures were executed without any trouble worthy of the name, in a spirit equitable to the old owners as well as to the serfs. Not alone were the latter released from bondage, they were provided, one and all, with land and livelihood. They were given, in everything that concerned their local administration, entire freedom from interference by their old masters or by the members of the Administration. The righteous deed that the American Republic achieved nearly three years later liberated but one ninth the number of the Russian bondmen. It did so at the cost of the deadliest fratricidal war of modern times, and the impoverishment of one quarter of its people. All the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau through the Reconstruction period could not insure to a tithe of the Negroes the opportunity for a livelihood,--this that Russia provided inalienably for each of her liberated. To this day the American Negro in many places is under special civic disabilities more galling than those imposed anywhere in the Russian Empire.

The protection of the former serfs was skillfully arranged by grouping them in self-governing village communes, to which land enough was given on a long-term repayment basis. In each, by an assembly composed of all the heads of households, periodic allotments of the common territory were made to the individuals. Compact economic units, whose property could not be sold, were built up against alienation of the land or poverty-induced peonage. The rendering of justice in local disputes was delegated to the peasant courts,--the only tribunals in Russia, save the National Senate, from which there is no appeal.

The Mir, complete within itself, was responsible to the Imperial Government for good order and the taxes, and was secure from molestation provided these duties were fulfilled. Its inhabitants, united and independent, were able to resist any encroachment by their former masters or by neighboring landlords.

It is not unworthy of note that up to the present time the liberties in economic matters thus granted have rarely been infringed by the authorities, nor have the village assemblies been exploited as a play in politics or to attain personal ends. While agriculturally and industrially the communal land provisions have become insufficient, cramping, perhaps baneful, and no longer necessary now that society is in equilibrium, nevertheless the germ of free institutions fecundated in the Mir, when dissociated from its communal features, is admirable still, and is capable of becoming the foundation for real self-government.

Plans for provincial assemblies as a further extension of local home rule had been under consideration since 1859. On January 1, 1864, an Imperial Ukase was promulgated instituting Semstvos in thirty-three governments. To this assembly, proprietor and peasant, rich and poor, elected their representatives. Each Semstvo was to appoint its own executive to carry out the laws it decreed.

The jurisdiction of this assembly, though confined to local and non-political matters, was wide. Rates, streets, convocations, posts, sanitary measures, famine-relief, fire-insurance, schools, agricultural improvement, all land, house, and factory taxes (those upon imperial as well as those upon private domains), were given into the Semstvo control. It was granted partial powers over various other minor matters. It exercised practically all the economic and social functions of local governmental activity save what fell to the Mirs. It was welcomed as an epoch-making institution. The liberal press of the period hailed it as a living guidon of the upward way, as the blessed daylight of a constitutional government.

So indeed it might have become. In the new Emperor’s mind there germinated a whole peaceful revolution. He had plans for new courts of justice, reorganization of the army, reform of the civil administration, and popular representative government, with an elected national chamber.

But in the midst of his reforms broke out the Polish insurrection. The Czar had granted to the Poles elective councils in each district of government and in the chief cities; he had appointed a Pole his Minister of Public Instruction, and had made many concessions to their old language. Iron and blood crushed out the insurrection, but it had brought to the great Czar Liberator the conviction that liberty spelled disunion for Russia, and this belief was never to be dispelled.

Upon the Semstvo assemblies, no longer uplifted by the old generous enthusiasm of the sovereign, pressed little by little the dead weight of executive officialdom. One by one their functions were lopped away. More and more the selection of delegates was transferred to the administrative officials. The marshals of noblesse became chairmen, the governors vetoing overlords. Before the death of Alexander II, his once-cherished creations had lapsed from independent state legislatures into anomalous, semi-advisory councils, discussing roads, land-taxes, agriculture, and schools, and controlled by the land-owning nobles and the governors. Semstvo and Mir and Assemblies of the Noblesse became ornamental trimmings to the colossal edifice of the bureaucracy.

The assembling of all the functions of government into the hands of the executive became again the guiding principle of this system. “The Council of State,” whose office was that of discussing the budget and law-making proposals, was the simulacrum of a parliament. The Senate, which gave decision on special points appealed from the lower courts, and whose promulgation of all enactments was the hall-mark of their legality, was a form of supreme court. But both hung from above rather than rested on a substructure. They were substantially cut off from popular influences, their function was secondary action following origin in the executive bureaus. The Imperial Autocrat, deriving his right from Divinity alone, exercised, in addition to his executive functions and his duties as supreme commander of the armed forces of the State, those powers which by a segregation of functions would have fallen to the legislative bodies and the judiciary. In this, the ten ministries were his main agencies.

Under this system, legislation was inaugurated through the presentation of a project to the Czar by one of his ministers, or by outside petition, or perhaps by the imperial wish.

The proposed enactment, if the Czar ordered it to be further examined, was referred usually to an Imperial Commission of Study. Debates followed in the Advisory Council of State, and the completed bill, as framed by this body, was signed by the Emperor and became a ukase, to be formally promulgated by the Senate and enrolled as part of the law of the land. Interpretations of law were made by the Ministers, which none might gainsay. Thus was the legislative function absolute.

In the provinces the three functions of government were equally centralized. A governor (almost invariably a general or an admiral) through his subordinate executive officers duplicated in microcosm the system of the capital. The dependent Semstvo was his Council of State, the dependent judges composed his Senate, the dependent Semski Natschalniki, his executive ministers. Into his bureaus came the details of provincial government save such matters as the villagers settled in their own Mirs. The troops of the district were at his call, the gendarmerie under his orders carried out the judicial arrests and the drumhead condemnations that sent so many thousands along the road to Siberia.

In the placing of these proconsuls and their sustaining soldiery was applied the Roman rule, “Divide et impera.” The head officials of the provinces were from distant parts,--the Governor of Warsaw from Tiflis, the Governor of Odessa from Samara, the Governor of the Amur from the Baltic. The Orthodox Cossacks of the Don were in force among the troubled Poles and Jews of the western governments; the drafts from the peasantry of Little Russia garrisoned Tiflis and Turkestan, and Siberian regiments watched the Austrian frontier. Even the popes sent to petty village congregations were generally of far-off origin.

Though power was thus alienated from the people, the bureaucracy, by other agencies rooted deep in human nature, had twined itself around the daily life of society.

Every ambitious man in his profession, as he succeeded, was marked for promotion. Not only to office-holders and soldiers, but to everybody, throughout the whole social fabric, were “chins” or graded ranks given. Here for example is a selection from one of the lists of the Czar’s Christmas announcements:--

Appointed members of the Council of State: Privy Councilor Kabylinski, and Von Kaufman, Senator, Minister of Public Instruction, President of the Supreme Court.

Decorated with the St. Stanislaus Order, First Class: Major-General Hippolyt Grigerasch, Director of the Department of Physics and Electro-technology at the Nicholas Engineer Academy and School.

Decorated with the St. Vladimir Order of the Third Class: Major-General Michael Hahnenfeldt, on the staff of his Imperial Highness the Supreme Commander of Guards in the St. Petersburg Military District.

Valentin Magorski, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Chief of the Veterinary Staff.

Alexander Pomeranzev, Professor of Architecture.

Dimitri Sassiyadke, Governor of Radom.

Michael Mardarjev, Censor of Foreign Papers and Journals.

Advanced to the ranking Chin of actual State Councilor, hereditary “honorable citizen” Constantine Popov, founder and director of the Tea Emporiums.

Raised into hereditary “honorable citizenship” of the 3d gild, the Archangel merchant Emil Brautigam.

Given personal “honorable citizenship,” Vladimir Ritimoun, Proprietor of the Wollner Typographical Establishment; Karl Volter, Captain of the steamer _Emperor Nicholas II_, of the Riga Navigation Co.

When a professor from his books was called up before the highest provincial dignitary to have pinned on his lapel for honorable service to the Empire the Order of St. Stanislaus, it was hard for him not to have a warm sentiment for those who had so signally recognized his talents. When on the document which recorded the promotion of a royal prince to a colonelcy was enrolled the name of a tradesman; when a neighboring doctor was raised his step in civil rank, each felt the touchstone. All who had served well in their respective positions might hope to be on the honor list, and this was the most effective tribute to the weakness, the worth, and the ambition of human nature.

In Russia, as in France under Napoleon’s iron yoke, there was a welcome to every sort of ability, and its elevation to posts of the highest trust. The aristocracy sought for was one of power, not that of a small birth-caste. A fundamental democracy ran through society. Save for a few of the Guards regiments, the army was officered by poor men. The Cossacks’ officers were chosen from among their own people and were state-trained. In the knapsack of every soldier was Skobelov’s baton; in the desk of every chinovnik, Witte’s portfolio.

So stood the bureaucratic edifice, complete in itself. Here and there a popular embellishment was added, perhaps to strengthen, often to conceal; but in grim reality it formed no part of the structure. Thus the Russian Empire finished out the nineteenth century. With the twentieth the system had come to trial for its stewardship.

In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given, wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing.

It is again a credit that the governmental attitude to the industrial classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily. Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’ board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”

The other side of the ledger is, however, not without weighty items. While no system of government can legislate prosperity, the public welfare is rightfully the first test, as it should be the first consideration, of an administration. Despite her immense territories, her vast mineral deposits, her fertile soils, her navigable rivers, her abundant timber, all the natural sources of national wealth, Russia is very poor. The peasants have more than doubled in number since the allotment of communal fields that followed the emancipation, and they are in general want. Vast stretches, whole provinces, are subject to periodic famine. Millions of the people are constantly on the brink of starvation. Manufacturing is, as a rule, desultory, undeveloped, and, in general, unprofitable.

The per-capita wealth of Russia is estimated at but two hundred and seventy-five dollars, as compared to Germany’s seven hundred dollars, France’s eleven hundred and twenty dollars, and England’s twelve hundred and thirty-five dollars. The savings-bank deposits reported for all Russia average but $2.75 per man, while in France they average $20.82, in England $15.00, and in Austria $15.68.

The degree of administrative responsibility for this condition is of course not to be definitely laid down. Much manifestly is due to natural conditions, national character, and historic handicaps; and some of the resultants would be the same under any administrative policy. Russia in her great area has had a sparse population. She has not, like her sister nations, and preëminently America, been able to lay the rest of the world under teeming contribution to her citizenship. She has had only her natural increase, and no such record as that of the United States has been possible. The Slav is not commercial, but agricultural. He has remained poor, and has had relatively very small resources to devote to what have proved our two greatest developing forces--internal improvement and education.

It is, however, a matter directly involved in government that, with this low standard of national living, there is the correlated fact of extremely high national expenditure. An immense budget of two billion roubles, ordinary expenditure, is annually met, which the war-loans raised to a total, for some years, of over three billions.

It is the general belief that a large part of the public funds is frittered away in needless waste, with multitudes of idling clerks and sinecure officials. Granting the benefit of doubt, assuming that the Administration’s corruption and inefficiency are exaggerated, and supposing that the public money is in the main honestly and productively spent, it is still a very serious question if any public service rendered by the agents of Government can correspond to or justify the immense burden of taxation heaped upon a people whose economic distress is so terrible.

The weight of the tax-levy crushing the peasants, whose improvident habits aggravate their want, is, for most, unescapable unless they follow the emigrant’s road to Siberia. The rate-gatherer can take anything the mujik has, save his last coat, his last horse, his seed-grain for next year. He is, with fateful frequency, forced to hire himself out to whoever will use his services, and this during the brief summer season which is so supremely essential if he is to attend to his own crops and fields. One landowner relates that he has seen paid an average of five roubles ($2.50) a month for farm-laborers, including men, women, and children, during June, July, and August.

Under the old system the method of rate-levy on the “souls” in a family weighed inequitably. Census revision was delayed in one instance, personally related, by over twenty-three years. A family taxed, twenty-three years before, on a father, four brothers, and two adult sons,--seven souls,--was still assessed for seven males, whether the family had increased to twenty, or been reduced to one. Each member of the household was responsible for the total.

It is related that whole families in Samara, reduced by the fearful cholera epidemic of some years back from scores of men to a dozen or ten, had to leave their home-country for Siberia to escape the load of their dead brothers.

Discussing the economic loss of the years of military service, one of the country nobles related an incident. He told of ordering the dead leaves and branches cleared out of his lake. Ordinarily, he said, he did not go near the work or let the peasants come near his château, for there was a good deal of class-hostility where he lives. But he was interested in the lake because the branches were killing some specially cherished fish, so he went down through the woods and was surprised to see nobody working. All the men were crowded round a peasant whom he had cited as an example of those who, though unlettered, had great capacity. This man had served seven years in the navy and could neither read nor write, a commentary upon what the service training was. He was declaiming on politics, and the squire stepped behind a tree, for the peasant spoke musically and well. The man was telling about his naval service: “Seven years on the boats I have been, brothers, and every three months I got ninety kopecks to buy a string for the crucifix and to cut my hair. I had no money for tobacco, none to send home to my wife in all this time, and I came home without a kopeck. Seven years of my life I have given to the Czar. What has he given me? What has he given you?” The landowner stepped from behind the tree and faced the group of startled peasants. “You have heard, your honor? Well it is true, it is true!”

The measure which under existing land-conditions would most directly raise the standard of life is the improvement of the mediæval agricultural system, and this depends upon the intelligence of the people at large. Scientific farming needs technical knowledge, yet of the great sums collected, a very small portion goes to education. The Nation spends for it but forty-three million roubles, the Semstvos but twenty million roubles, or together one eighth of the military budget.

A tedious, inefficient course in Slavonic, with the prayer-books as text, a smattering of modern Russian, sometimes mathematics as far as multiplication and division,--this is the state education of the privileged few of the peasants’ children. Whatever small amount of real knowledge is gained is quickly submerged in the ocean of ignorance at home. The percentage of illiteracy is very great. The record gives Switzerland five, Germany seven, Great Britain ten, France fifteen, Russia eighty-four.