Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/649

Rh usual terms of a ground-rent of thirty copecks per acre. The other half of the miners continued at their old employment, and are now efficient laborers, who accomplish more in freedom than they formerly did in servitude, so that the mines are becoming more profitable every year. Up to the year 1861 the return in most cases did not cover the outlay. In order to cover the deficiency of laboring forces, persons condemned to death and then pardoned were added to the free miners.

From this time agriculture improved rapidly, and in the year 1876 half of Siberia was already settled. A free peasantry was formed, such as we might desire to see in the whole of the country. There are no servile persons like the Russian peasants, and, when I occasionally by inadvertence called them "Russians," they would immediately inform me that I was mistaken, they were "Siberians." "There is no servitude here," they would add; "we are all free men. Heaven is high and the Czar rich, but we have nothing to fear, for we are in Siberia." Not the farmers alone, but the officers also, are inflated with this air of freedom, and not unfrequently may we hear from the mouth of one of the latter such words as, "If you want to see slaves, you must go back over the Ural into Russia, where their home is." And these people speak with truth, for, although serfdom is legally abolished in Russia, it continues to exist in fact, even among the mercantile classes.

I had already been told in Russia that prosperity was generally prevailing in Siberia, and shone in strong contrast with Russian poverty, and I am again obliged to say here that even Russian poverty is not so repulsively conspicuous as the misery in the German factory and mining districts. I do not go too far in asserting that the Siberians lead a happy life; and the best evidence in confirmation of this opinion is found in the fact that the idea of an independent Siberia, not attached to Russia, has already begun to dawn in a few speculative minds. I must guard myself against the suspicion that I am falling into a merely subjective judgment. My opinion is founded on careful observations and conscientious inquiries. It is generally known that in all countries and governments the farmers are always complaining of hard times and high taxes, and I therefore took special pains to compare these peculiar complaints with the representations of the officers. I had arranged a kind of informal catechism in my head, and used it on every suitable opportunity. The answers were, in all cases, if not literally, substantially alike, and I can not forbear repeating one set of them here. My conductor and myself were staying a short time in a little mountain-town, and in one of my excursions I overtook an old peasant who I afterward learned was the head-man of a small village. I invited him to take a seat in my carriage, and at once opened my catechism upon him:

 "How is it with you here?" said I. "God bears with our sins," he replied.