THE AMUR RAILWAY.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 13094, 20 April 1908, Page 7

THE AMUR RAILWAY.

A COSTLY UNDERTAKING,

United Press Association—By N Electric Telegraph—Copyright.

ST. PETERSBURG, April 17. Tbe Amur Railway from Kujenga

to Khabarmosk, will cost £21,500,000, or about £16,600 per mile. It is to be •built entirely with Russian materials, and 'by Russian labour.

In view of the Duma's acceptance of the Bill authorising railway extension in the Amur region j it is worthy of note that in- his recent book, "The Coming Struggle in the Far East," Mr Putnam Weale, one of the most serious students of recent events in that part of the world, suggests that Russia is not mortally or permanently injured in her policy of expansion by "her defeat in the war. He gives a glowing account of the resources or the transBaikal and Amur provinces, and of the enterprise which is developing them. In all those regions the Russian genius for transport comes in. No one,. Mr Weale tells us, "has properlj; realised that as land-carriers the Russians have' always been the first people in the world. Their surprising railway work during the war.was simply a restatement, in modern form, of this old-time land-carrying supremacy." Military disaster has made no difference to the onward movement which peoples tfils country. The towns especially have made astonishing progress in the last two years, and the drawing-in and concentration of effort which became necessary after 1905 have placed the movement on sounder and more permanent lines. Towns like Nioolaievsk, which lies en the Pacific in "the uttermost East," have already a European population greater than that of any English city in Asia. Russia's great asset, in fact, is population— "the enormous and victorious preponderance in numbers that she possesses.'' Russia, moreover, has all sorts of people, from top-hatted men of business to wild and semi-Oriental trappers and frontiersmen, and this great country offers careers to them all. Mr Weale stands in the "wonderful city of Harbin," and is "lost in astonishment at the character of the Russian resources." Despite all corruption, all carelessness and ineptitude —things on which the neutral world is never tired of expatiating—the great country "lumbers continually forward, gathering greater and greater strength merely from its own onward movement." _■•-■.