Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/439

Rh Ocean and through all the northern part of Siberia the yessak, or tax, is one fox-skin; in Kamtchatka it was formerly one sable-skin, but since the increase in the price of the fur, one skin is received for every four inhabitants, who arrange the division among themselves. In some of the grain-growing parts of the Empire the tax is paid in grain; on the Amoor River it is paid in fish, and among the Kirghese and Turcomans it is paid

in cattle, sheep, or horses, which constitute the circulating medium of the country.

"In return for this tax, and provided the new subject in Central Asia behaves himself, he has the protection of a powerful government. The Russian Government has its faults, but it is immeasurably superior to the old way in which these countries were ruled.

"By the religion of the Moslem might makes right, and this was the foundation of the governmental system of the Kirghese and Turcoman tribes, together with the khanates previously mentioned. Robbery was a recognized means of making a living; not robbery by detail, as practised by highwaymen and burglars, but wholesale robbery in which entire tribes were concerned. Many thousands of people lived by raiding, and the raid 28