THE NEW CALIFORNIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2513, 14 May 1902, Page 66

THE NEW CALIFORNIA.

(S. M. Williams, in Munsey's Magazine.) Just as the> Great West of the United States leaped suddenly out of unexplored waste into the fairest and richest region of America, so the Great East of Siberiais springing into its rightful position of supremacy in Asia. The seeker after fortune, be he agriculturist, miner, or business man. finds in Siberia the most fruitful field of the Orient. What Siberia lacks is freedom — freedom to expand, freedom to learn out of books the methods of the West, freedom to govern itself. But the need of this personal liberty is much less in Eastern countries than with us in the West. Democracy were a strange flower to grow on the Siberian steppes. The people are not ready for it. They do not hunger for it. They do not understand it. They are content with patriarchism. The fundamental idea of Russian government is paternalism. The Czar is the father 01 his people. They are his children. They yield to him the respectful obedience of a son to a father. There is nothing more beautiful in the history of governments. Emancipation, to be effective, must be slow. The Imperial Russian Government knows this, and dreads only a sudden revulsion against old systems and established theories of administration. The peasantry of Siberia, and indeed of all Russia, is an ignorant peasantry — the peasantry that can be disciplined only by the knout — and that is best governed by physical force. With this theory of government constantly in mind, the Czar and his Ministers are seeking gradually to raise Russia into a higher and a more enlightened •civilisation.. This theory is prone to failure, but its failures have been more eagerly chronicled abroad than, its successes. No one can travel through Russia without realising that the Czar and ifiS Ministers are sincere in their belief in paternalism, and in their endeavour to make it work for the good of the whole nation.

Siberia — great, boundless, glorious Siberia — suffers under the restraint that is thought necessary in European Russia. The yoke of too much government presses heavily upon the settler along the fringe of civilisation. There is no danger of his hatching treason plots or lending himself to bloody revolutionary schemes. He has his country to develop, his surroundings to mould to his own needs, ~his children to educate, himself to adapt to the circumstances of a new life, a new origin. Freedom is the breath in his nostrils, and oppression, alone, can tempt him into rebellion. And yefc the Russian Government has not realised this difference between its people of the west and its people of the east. It has chosen to trammel this broad, open-aired country with the irritating details of the government it finds necessary in the towns and cities of European Russia. I have little hope for this Russia in Europe, with its serfs and its sects ; but I have a boundless faith in Siberia. With its farms like the wheat fields of Dakota, its mines like those of Colorado, its rivers like the Mississippi, and its forests like those of Canada, Siberia is a country of marvellous promise — an eastern California. There is but one way to see the Siberia, of to-day, and it is a good way. The great Siberian road crosses the country from the European border to the Pacific Ocean — a straightaway distance of more than 5000 miles. Although not quite completed yet in the Manchurian section, before the present year ends, there will be through railway travel from Paris to Vladivostok — 9000 miles due east.

Siberia certainly possesses snow and ice in abundance, and numbers among its people many exiles ; but the practical abolition of the political exile system in Russia has modified this last and greatest evil. Exiles are of three kinds — political exiles, murderers, and minor criminals. Political offenders form the smallest, though the most sensational, portion of these involuntary settlers. They are not always confined in prisons, but live in banishment within restricted areas. Ordinary criminals are pent up in big prisons, more like barracks than the stone penitentiaries of America. From these come the woret, and the far too numerous, cla^s of settlers. As the old time Botany Bay convicts threatened to poison the young lile of Australia, so these criminals endanger the sweet youth of Siberia. Life convicts, the scum of Russia, are now sent for the most part to Kamchatka and the island of Sakhalin, off the far northeastern coast. Their life there is a purgatory ; their presence on earth a menace to a fair young country. Due to tnis exile system, one settler in ten is a convicted breaker of the law. Happily, national pride is beginning to afsert itself in protest against the nation's colony being made the dumping ground of the nation's criminality. '

It is frrtm the east the Americans luave reached Siberia. They have found the Germans dread} 7 there, and have entered with them into a rivalry that means the commercial development of Siberia. Against these men . of brains and money the helpless naucer Russian iniTn.jprn.nb

stands no chance. The yellow races do the labour, the Americans plan the fortunes. From Lake Baikal to the Pacific the mountains are filled with gold, with iron and coal. It is a new California, and the Americans 01 the Pacific coast are not blind to its potentialities. The Amur River flows from 2000 miles in the interior eastward to the ocean. It is one of the great waterways of the world, ranking with the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon. The railway that was planned to follow its banks has darted off to the south-eas 1 through Manchuria, thus leaving two grea outlets for trade and travel. Manchuri. is as Russian to-day as is the Amur territory. In name It is Chinese, but in actuality it is Russian. The grip of "the bear" is npon it, and its hug will never be loosened while the Czar's Government remains supreme in Russia.