Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/120

 84 and close proximity to the Yellow and Mussulman races of Central Asia, from whom she is divided by radical differences of race and religion, has far more cause for shouldering these burdens to preserve her peculiar nationality than any of the nations in Western Europe, where racial divisions are becoming submerged by the steady growth of international trade and finance.

We then discussed the relations of Siberia to European Russia, and I was interested to find that he agreed with me in comparing them with those of Canada and the United Kingdom. In Siberia, he said, the land is richer and less occupied, and the life is freer and less restricted, so that the Siberians have developed a more independent character and resent being treated like proteges by old-fashioned bureaucrats in St Petersburg. At present Siberia has only eight members in the Duma—far below its proper representation, according to population, as compared with European Russia. In fact Siberia is purposely under-represented, so that she may not become too powerful in the Duma. But it is not merely Russian officialdom, he continued, that Siberia has to contend with. There are great commercial vested interests in old Russia which oppose the growing feeling for Siberian local autonomy. If a Siberian local administration were formed it might carry out many fiscal reforms which would affect the interests of the great manufacturing trusts in Moscow. It might agitate for free ports at the mouth of the Yenisei and Obi and thus let in cheap foreign manufactures, making Siberia a less easy victim of the artificial monoply in cotton goods and small manufactures from European Russia. At present