We got into Vladivostok three days late. The transport in which I should have sailed for home departed the day before I arrived. And a notice in headquarters warned me not to go near the Trans-Siberian station because there were many cases of typhus among the refugees sleeping in the corridors! It is needless to state that I calmly went there for my baggage without worrying about typhus after living so many days in trains and stations reeking with typhus and other diseases. But one gets very finicky living at headquarters. Incidentally, there was a lot of tiger hunting done on the stairs of headquarters at Vladivostok. The whole staff became inveterate tiger hunters, and remained so, till a big Siberian tiger came down near Vladivostok and killed a bull and ate it. On the fifteenth of February, 1919, I was aboard the Russian steamer _Simbirsk_ when it pushed out through the ice in the bay. But I was not yet out of Siberia. The stewards never cleaned our rooms or made up our berths, the ship still had the same old Siberian smell, the decks and carpets in salon and passage-ways remained consistently filthy, and we had to put to sea without an adequate supply of fresh water. In two days I reached Tsuruga, Japan, went to Yokohama by train, and caught the _Tenyo Maru_ for San Francisco. When ashore in Japan, I found once more that the world was going on in its old way--trunks could be checked, tickets purchased which insured the right to a seat in a train, beds were clean, food came soon after being ordered. I felt as if I had escaped from an insane asylum. I had had enough of Bolshevism to last me the rest of my life. And I suggest that when any men or women develop a leaning for Bolshevism in this country, that they be shipped to Siberia. The trip will kill or cure. XXIV THE PEASANTS The problem of Siberia is the peasant-minded population. I use this term to avoid confusion with what is the popular conception of “peasant,” that is, a tiller of the soil, a rude and ignorant farmer or farm-hand, the human being described in Russian as “_moujik_.” The mass of the people is peasant-minded, whether working in cities or in the wilderness. The fact that those in the cities have acquired urban characteristics, does not to my mind prevent them from having mental calibers on a par with the rural population when it comes to knowledge of government, or minds revealing any alertness toward new ideas or reaction to anything with which they are unfamiliar. This vast population appears to be mentally static.