He then dwelt upon sundry evil conditions in Russia, on which my comment was that every country, of course, had its own grievous shortcomings; and I cited, as to America, the proverb: "No one knows so well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it." At this he asked me about lynch law in the United States, and expressed his horror of it. I showed him that it was the inevitable result of a wretched laxity and sham humanity in the administration of our criminal law, which had led great bodies of people, more especially in the Southern and extreme Western parts of the country, to revert to natural justice and take the law into their own hands; and I cited Goldwin Smith's profound remark that "some American lynchings are proofs not so much of lawlessness as of a respect for law." He asked me where, besides this, the shoe pinched in the United States. I told him that it pinched in various places, but that perhaps the worst pinch arises from the premature admission to full political rights of men who have been so benumbed and stunted intellectually and morally in other countries that their exercise of political rights in America is frequently an injury, not only to others, but to themselves. In proof of this I cited the case of the crowds whom I had seen some years before huddled together in New York tenement-houses, preyed upon by their liquor-selling landlords, their families perishing of typhoid and smallpox on account of the negligence and maladministration of the local politicians, but who, as a rule, were almost if not quite ready to mob and murder those of us who brought in a new health board and a better order of things; showing him that for years the very class of people who suffered most from the old, vile state of things did their best by their votes to keep in power the men who maintained it. We then passed to the subject of the trans-Siberian Railway. In this he seemed interested, but in a vague way which added nothing to my knowledge. Asking me regarding my former visit to Moscow, and learning that it was during the Crimean War, he said, "At that time I was in Sebastopol, and continued there as a soldier during the siege." As to his relations with the imperial government at present, he said that he had been recently elected to a learned society in Moscow, but that the St. Petersburg government had interfered to stop the election; and he added that every morning, when he awoke, he wondered that he was not on his way to Siberia.