THE RUSSIAN CHARACTER.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXXI, 10 June 1916, Page 3

THE RUSSIAN CHARACTER.

One is apt, perhaps, to take a too romantic view, of tnose really quite p?->mitive people, our Eastern Allies. "Really we're neither savages nor the otner tilings," says one of them. "We have simply a skin less than you Englishmen. We are a very young people, a real and genuine democracy, and we care for quite siiTiple tilings —women, food, sleep, money, quite simply and without restraint. In Moscow they eat all day and are not ashamed. Why should they be? In Kieft they think always about women, and do not pretend otherwise. . . Wet.how our eagerness, our disgust, our disappointment, our amusement, simply as the naood moves us. We have no sense of time, or method, or system. But we care for ideas, for which you care nothing in England. We are pessimists, one and all. Life cannot be good. We give way always to life, but when things are at their worst we are relieved and even happy. You Englishmen seem solemn to us, but that's your tranquility that's so nnlike our moods and nerves, by which we kill ourselves, dead before we are half-way through life." Which helps to explain a good many things, doesn't it? —"Blanche," .in The Bystander.