Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/67

 Rh read and write. Under these circumstances one does not expect to see a social and economic system like that of Western Europe springing up in a day. Great as are the economic possibilities of Siberia, no one can blind himself to the fact that its future economic development must not only go hand in hand with, but be directly dependent on, the social and political evolution which is now in progress in the Russian Empire.

In Krasnoyarsk no less than in other commercial and administrative centres of Siberia one can see this gradual change in progress. Not much is to be seen of the old Siberia of our youthful imaginations, where convicts work in gold mines and fur traders dwell isolated for months in snow-clad forests. The former have been replaced by political exiles who go about as ordinary citizens and speculate in gold concessions or work on the land, and the latter one only sees if one goes far enough into the remoter districts. What we see to-day in the more populous parts of Western and Central Siberia is the development of the natural resources of the country—its minerals, furs, live stock and agricultural produce—the growth of wholesale commerce with European Russia, the indications of the decline of domestic industry, the beginnings of workshop and small factory industry, and the gradual rise of a wage-earning proletariat. We also see a Slavonic civilization, pure and simple, planted on the land direct from old Russia. There is no large native Siberian population or a native element racially and religiously differing from the Russians, and no native question to distract its administrators as in Turkestan and the Caucasus. The little Finnish tribes in the northern