Newness, progress, hopefulness are characteristics of civil Wladivostok. It has the aspect of a growing city in the American Far West. Few things are finished and all are going ahead. The sidewalks are mostly narrow, and composed of rough planks, with a tendency to tip up or down, but here and there is a fine piece of granite flagging 10 feet wide. The hotels have more of the shady character of “saloons” or barrooms than of anything reputable or established. Handsome houses of brick and stone shoulder wooden shanties. Fashionable carriages or sleighs bounce over ungraded streets. The antediluvian ox-cart with its Korean driver bumps and creaks through the streets alongside of the _troika_, with its three galloping horses in showy harness, and its occupants in the latest and daintiest of Parisian costumes. But the all-pervading flavor of militarism overpowers the suggestion of the American Far West. The first buildings on the barren coast are military hospitals and barracks, and barracks thicken as the city is approached. The female element is in a remarkable minority. The dull roll of artillery and commissariat wagons, the tramp, morning and night, of brown battalions, and the continual throb of drum and blare of trumpet and bugle, recall one to the fact that this is the capital of Russia’s vast, growing, aspiring, Pacific Empire. Theatricals, concerts, and balls fill up the winter season. Except on the few days on which snow falls, the skies are cloudless, the temperature is not seriously below zero, and the dryness of the air is very invigorating. In winters, happily somewhat exceptional, in which there is no snowfall, and the strong winds create dust-storms, the climate is less agreeable. Spring is abrupt and pleasant, and autumn is a fine season, but summer is hot, damp, and misty. A fine Greek cathedral, with many domes and lofty gilded crosses, which gleam mysteriously in the sunset when the gloom of twilight has wrapped all else, a prominent Lutheran church, and a Chinese joss-house, provide for the religious needs of the population. The Governor of the Maritime Province, several of the leading, and many of the lower officials are of German origin from the Baltic provinces, Lutherans, and possibly imbued with a few liberal ideas. But among the kindly, cultured, and agreeable people whose acquaintance I made in Wladivostok one peculiarity impressed me forcibly--the absolute stagnation of thought, or the expression of it, on politics and all matters connected with them, the administration of government, religion, the orthodox church, dissent, home and foreign policy, etc. It is true that certain subjects, and these among the most interesting, are carefully eliminated from conversation, and that to introduce any one of them might subject the offender to social ostracism. FOOTNOTES: