It is an interesting fact that Americans and Englishmen were the real authors of this splendid and romantic scheme for spanning the Asiatic continent with a railway from west to east. In 1857, an American named Collins came forward with a scheme for the formation of an Amur Railway Company, to lay a line from Irkutsk to Chita. Although his plan was not officially adopted, it was carefully kept in mind, and it actually forms the main and central part of the present line. An English engineer offered to lay a tramroad across Siberia, after Muravieff had carried Russia to the Pacific by his brilliant annexation of the mouths of the Amur. In 1858, three Englishmen offered to construct a railway from Moscow through Nijni-Novgorod to Tartar Bay. Though all proposals by foreigners have been courteously shelved, they have in reality formed the bases of native enterprise. It is to the credit of Russia that she has determined to depend on the energy and ability of her own sons to carry out this colossal undertaking. One of the chronic troubles of the Russian Government arises from the uneven distribution of the population. It happens that those are the most thickly inhabited districts which are the least able to support a dense population. For instance, an immense number of villages are scattered through the vast forest regions of Central and Western Russia, where birch trees grow by millions, while the great wheat-growing plains of the west centre and south-west are but sparsely inhabited. Then again, the infatuation of the military oligarchy has been evidenced in the plan by which all the railways except this new Siberian line have been designed for purely military purposes. The Emperor Nicholas insisted on all the lines being developed without the slightest regard to the wants of the towns and the conveniences of commerce. Even the natural facilities for engineering operations were not allowed by that autocrat to be for a moment taken into consideration. His engineers were once consulting him as to the expediency of taking the line from St. Petersburg to Moscow by a slight detour, to avoid some very troublesome obstacles. The Tsar took up a ruler, and with his pencil drew a straight line from the old metropolis. Handing back the chart, he peremptorily said: "There, gentlemen, that is to be the route for the line!" And certainly there is not a straighter reach of 600 miles on any railroad in the world, as every tourist knows who has journeyed between the two chief cities of the Russian Empire. For instance, not very far beyond the Urals there is one magnificent stretch of perfectly straight road for 116 versts, or nearly eighty miles.