Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/450

Rh settlers. Of the Russians nearly 35,000 are Nonconformists, according to official figures, but the number is greatly understated. Many of the Samoyedes, Ostiaks, and Voguls are nominally Christians. The Russians and the Tartars, who chiefly inhabit South Tobolsk, mostly live by agriculture. Of the total area of land regarded as suitable for cultivation (28,400,000 acres), 15,600,000 are owned by the peasant communities. Summer wheat, rye, oats, barley, and some buckwheat are raised. Flax and hemp and tobacco are cultivated in the south, where cattle-breeding also is extensively carried on. The ravages of anthrax, however (see, ), are very severe, especially in the marshy parts of the province. The indigenous inhabitants of the north had, in the same year, more than 100,000 reindeer. Dogs are used in sledges in the far north. In the forest region the chief means of existence are found in the forests. The pursuit of bears, wolves, foxes, squirrels, ermines, stags, elks, as also of sables and beavers (rapidly disappearing), is a regular occupation with the Russian peasants as well as with the indigenous inhabitants; sledges and cars, mats, sieves, wooden vessels, and pitch and tar are also manufactured to a considerable extent in the villages (valued at about £150,000). Cedar-nuts (from 5000 to 8000 cwts. every year) are gathered, partly for the sake of their oil. The fisheries of the Ob and the southern lakes are important; no fewer than 1700 Ostiaks are engaged in them on the Ob. No less than 200,000 cwts. of fish are annually caught in the district of Tara alone, and Surgut exports it to the value of £10,000, while in the Narym region 10,000 cwts. of salt are used for preserving the fish.

The industries are insignificant (chiefly tanning, distilling, and tallow-melting); iron-works and woollen-cloth mills are still in their infancy. The export of cattle, hides, tallow, corn, flour, fish, and furs to Russia, both from Tobolsk and from the Kirghiz steppe, is of some importance. Spirits are sent farther east, to Tomsk; while all kinds of manufactured wares are imported from Russia. The fairs of Irbit and Ishim are the chief centres for trade.

The educational institutions are few. It is worthy of remark that of "secondary schools" (gymnasia and pro-gymnasia) there were in 1883 eight for girls, with 1065 scholars, and only four for boys, with 711 scholars; of primary schools there were 250, with 5844 boys and 1403 girls.

Tobolsk is divided into ten districts (‘’okrugs’’), the chief towns (with populations in 1883) being Tobolsk (20,130), Berezoff (1990), Ishim (7100), Kurgan (8570), Surgut (1460), Tara (8640), Turinsk (4650), Tyukatinsk (3900), Tyumeñ (14,300), and Yalutorovsk (4500). Of these towns, only and  (q.v.) are really entitled to the designation, the others being mere villages, of less importance than many others on the great Siberian highway which crosses the government from Tyumeñ to Tomsk.

 TOBOLSK, capital of the above government, is situated on the right bank of the Irtish, near its junction with the Toboł. It is 1535 miles from Moscow, and since the alteration of the course of the great Siberian highroad from Tyumeñ to Tomsk it has become an out-of-the-way place, and is no longer either capital of Western Siberia or even an administrative centre for exiles, as it was formerly. Viewed from the Irtish, the town has a picturesque aspect, with its kreml, or stone walls, built on a crag 200 feet high, its twenty-one churches, and several elegant buildings. The kreml, built under Peter I. by Swedish prisoners, in imitation of the kreml of Moscow, is 430 yards long by 200 yards in breadth, and contains two cathedrals erected towards the end of the 17th century. The bell of Uglitch, which rang the alarm when the czarevitch Dmitri was assassinated by order of Boris Godunoff, and therefore had its "ear torn away," and was exiled to Siberia, stands close by. The palace of the governor, the administrative offices, the seminary where the historian of Siberia, Slovtsoff, received his education, the gymnasium where Mendeléeff the chemist was trained, and the Marie school for girls, which now supplies Siberia with so many teachers, are in the upper part of the town, where broad grassy spaces separate the wide streets paved with thick planks. A monument to Yermak, the rebel Cossack who conquered Siberia, stands in a prominent place; and one of the sides of the large square on the crag is occupied by the immense prison, where more than 2000 exiles are gathered during the period of navigation. The lower part of the town stands on a sandy beach of the Irtish, and often suffers from floods. Its sanitary condition is very bad. The merchants of Tobolsk carry on a fairly brisk trade in corn from the south, salt from Semipalatinsk, timber and fish from the lower Ob. The population is almost stationary (20,130 in 1883, as against 15,500 in 1839 and 15,200 in 1772). Some 12 miles to the south east are the ruins of the "fort of Kutchum,"—the seat of the capital of Siberia, Isker, before the Russian conquest.

Tobolsk was founded in 1587 by 500 Cossacks who left Tyumeñ under Tchulkoff, and built a wooden fort at the mouth of the Old Toboł. During the next fifteen years several other forts were erected on the territory now occupied by Tobolsk. The Ostiaks and Samoyedes soon submitted to Russian rule, but the Tartars and Bashkirs made frequent raids, so that a line of forts had to be built in the 17th century from Orenburg to Ishim. In 1752 a new line of forts was erected some 150 miles farther south, and since that time Russian settlers have been able quietly to colonize the most fertile parts to the south of Tobolsk.

 TOCQUEVILLE, (1805-1859), was born at Verneuil on July 29, 1805. His family on the father's side were of good descent, and distinguished both in the law and in arms, while his mother was the granddaughter of Malesherbes. Alexis de Tocqueville was brought up for the bar, or, rather, according to the division of that profession in France, for the bench, and became an assistant magistrate in 1830. A year later he obtained from the Government of July a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in America, and proceeded thither with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. He returned in somewhat less than two years, and published a report on the subject of his mission, but the real result of his tour was the famous ‘’De la Démocratie en Amerique’’, which appeared in 1835, and very soon made his reputation. It was at once caught up by influential members of the Liberal party in England, which country Tocqueville soon after visited, and where he married an Englishwoman. Returning to France, and beginning life as a country gentleman at Tocqueville, he thought to carry out the English ideal completely by standing for the chamber of deputies. But, with a scruple which illustrated his character, he refused Government nomination from Molé, and was defeated. Later he was successful, and sat for several years both before and after the revolution of February, becoming in 1849 vice-president of the assembly, and for a few months minister of foreign affairs. He was a warm supporter of the Roman expedition, but an equally warm opponent of Louis Napoleon, and after being one of the deputies who were arrested at the ‘’coup d’état’’ he retired from public life. Twenty years after his first, he produced another book, ‘’De I’Ancien Régime’’, which almost, if not quite, equalled its success. His health was never very strong, and in 1858 he broke a blood-vessel. He was ordered to the south, and, taking up his residence at Cannes, died there on the 16th of April 1859. He had published some minor pieces during his lifetime, and his complete works, including much unpublished correspondence, were produced after his death in uniform shape by De Beaumont.

During the last twenty years of his life, and for perhaps half that time after his death, Tocqueville had an increasing European fame, which for the last ten or fifteen years has been stationary if not diminishing. Both phenomena are susceptible of explanation. Although he has been accused by some of his own countrymen of having "le style triste," his manner, which is partly imitated from Montesquieu, has considerable charm; and he was the first and has remained the chief writer to put the orthodox liberal ideas which governed European politics during the first half or two-thirds of the 19th century into an orderly and attractive shape. He was, moreover, as has been said, much taken up by influential persons in England,—Senior, John Stuart Mill, and others,—and he had the great advantage of writing absolutely the first book of reasoned politics on the facts of democratic government as observed in America. Besides all this he was, if not an entirely impartial writer, neither a fanatical devotee of democracy nor a fanatical opponent of it. All this gave him a very great advantage which he has not yet wholly lost. At the same time he had defects which were certain to make themselves felt as time went on, even