Siberia 



321 



worthy immigrants. To every family, 

 when desired, it advances $25 for the 

 expenses of the journej^ assigns gra- 

 tuitously 40 acres to each man on his 

 arrival, and further promises to assist 

 with a loan of $50. The only great land- 

 lord is the emperor or the state. Serf- 

 dom has never existed east of the Urals. 

 Even political conditions, as affecting 

 the colonist, are not greatly unlike those 

 west of the Mississippi before the con- 

 struction of the Pacific Railroad. The 

 present population is over 7,000,000 

 persons. Among them are convicts and * 

 descendants of convict stock. None the 

 less this class forms already an incon- 

 siderable proportion. It is probably 

 no greater, if as great, as among the 

 Americans at the outbreak of the Revo- 

 lution. 



The impartial story of immigration to 

 the trans- Atlantic colonies in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries is not 

 congenial to our ancestral and material 

 pride. Nine of the colonies were offi- 

 cially penal stations, to which about 

 2,000 convicts were sent annually for 

 many years. From 17 15 to 1765 more 

 than 70,000 such persons were sent over, 

 among them 10,000 from the Old Bailey 

 alone. In 1787 Botany Bay was made 

 a convict station, that it might in that 

 capacity replace the then independent 

 American States. It is estimated that 

 today in the newly federated Common- 

 wealth of Australia through the veins 

 of three persons out of every seven flows 

 convict blood. In Australia, as in Amer- 

 ica, what was evil among the early set- 

 tlers has been largelj^^ absorbed in the 

 virgin political soil. Among a new peo- 

 ple only the brave and hardy qualities 

 tend to perpetuate themselves and to 

 endure. So is it and so will it be in 

 Siberia. Adullam's Cave, first the ren- 

 dezvous of outlaws, became the scene 

 and source of heroism and accomplish- 

 ment unsurpassed in the Bible. 



In the "Awakening of the East," 

 Pierre Eeroy-Beaulieu gives a vivid 



picture of the various groups of present 

 colonists at their nightly campings, the 

 men unsaddling the horses, the women 

 going to the springs and preparing food, 

 the children playing, and some old man 

 seated by the roadside reading the Bible 

 to attentive listeners. The stock now 

 peopling Siberia is that from which 

 empires are made. Partially delivered 

 from old traditions, equal in the de- 

 mocracy of labor, and forced to meet 

 new conditions and new exigencies, 

 Siberia is to solve political problems 

 with which old European Russia is un- 

 able to grapple. The sun of political 

 regeneration in the Russian Empire 

 shines from the East. 



WORLD ROUTES 



The currents of history are prone to 

 follow the beds of rivers, and commerce 

 at first wanders along the roads which 

 nature herself has marked out. Until 

 four centuries ago the East and the 

 West poured toward and across the 

 Mediterranean to reach and benefit each 

 other with the products of their agri- 

 culture and industry. The discovery of 

 the Cape of Good Hope and the circum- 

 navigation of Africa forced the aban- 

 donment of this ancient route, dealt the 

 death blow to the princely cities of the 

 Mediterranean, and centered the world's 

 front in the British Islands and Holland. 

 Now we are the amazed spectators of 

 the beginning of that which is to make 

 the world again change its base — com- 

 mercial, political, strategic, and perhaps 

 religious. Words can hardly exagger- 

 ate the momentous significance of the 

 Trans-Siberian Railway, a work not yet 

 completed, and the parts already in oper- 

 ation not 3^et beyond the initial, experi- 

 mental stage. Even when its rails are 

 at last in place and Vladivostok and 

 Port Arthur are in full connection with 

 St. Petersburg and Odessa, and the 

 trains conveying passengers and freight 

 begin to run with regularity and dis- 



