Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/54

 26 When one sees the great barracks for six or seven thousand troops, generally consisting of large log-houses (very like ordinary dwellings, only a little bigger, and surrounded by wooden palings), scattered in various parts of nearly every town, one realizes what an incubus of uneconomic expenditure militarism must be to the community. Youths at the best age of their lives are taken from home and put where they learn to use a rifle and to drill, but during a large part of the day they are to be seen idling about the barracks squares, eating nuts in company with their fellows. I used to talk to some of them while I was in Krasnoyarsk. They seemed to have no other idea in life except to get back to their villages. The discipline is no doubt good, and the fact that they see some of the other parts of the Empire has beneficial results, but the disadvantages would be less and the advantages more if these raw peasant youths were taught reading and writing, first of all, before they learnt the gentle art of murdering their fellow-men. If they then had facilities to learn useful trades they would be more fitted for work in the newer parts of the Empire, and thus they would become useful members of society, instead of remaining an incubus upon the Russian taxpayers at the best time of their lives. However, political conditions seem to demand that states should keep a large percentage of their youths in uneconomic employment for the best time of their early lives. This is especially so in the East. Here racial differences among nations are more clearly marked than in Western Europe, where such differences are, or ought to be, less.

The policy of the Government has always been to