RUSSIA'S TWO CLASSES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXIX, Issue 178, 30 July 1898, Page 4 (Supplement)

RUSSIA'S TWO CLASSES.

Let the visitor to Russia pursue his comparisons untjl, as nearly everyone fails, he concludes that he must be doing Russia an injustice—until he comes to reflect that the basis and root of its civilisation are Asiatic, and not European. Then the task of studying the huge.growing, progressive empire becomes easy and more pleasant at once. Let him once say 'Russia is Asiatic,' and with the change of his view point he sees everything differently. Then he stops criticising, and begins admiring. He is not in the last and most primitive corner of Europe. He is in the first and most advancing country of Asia.

The servants are lazy, loquacious, and familiar. You always find this suggestion of democracy where there is autocracy, or tyranny, or slavery, or where society is divided into only two classes as in Russia.

The heaviest swell on the steamship going to Russia, an

OFFICER OF THE EMPRESS'S GUARD, kept, stiffly aloof from the cabin passengers, but was freely approached and engaged in conversation by the Finn and Russian peasants of the steerage. The fashionable men on their way to Yalta on the Black Sea for the grape cure and the whirl of social dissipation, went among the bundled-up dirty peasants on the forward deck, and passed their cigarettes to them to light their own with, and chatted freely Avith them. Everywhere in Russia I noticed this. The position of the man in uniform is as secure as that of the wretch in long boots and a sheepskin coat, therefore they are at ease Avith one another. It is so in China, where the mobs flatten their noses against the mandarins' windows to • see what he is doing in his house. It is so in Turkey, where the Araba-ji, or cabman, turns his back to his horses and chats with his fare, the pasha. Exactly so does the isvostchik, or cabman, of Russia. Of course this used to be so in the English feudal hail, where the lord and his retainers all ate together, and rejoiced over his successes and mourned his bereavements together. But to-day it has bocome an Asiatic condition.—'Harper's.'