The Siberian peasant knew something was wrong when he was prevented from having the soil. He loves the soil, and he loves to make it produce. He and his forbears have been in the clutches of a governmental system so asinine as to thwart him in his desire to work the land. He endured this serfdom in fact, for ages, he endured serfdom under another guise since official serfdom has been abolished. Instigated and aided by the Bolshevists, who were in turn backed by Germany, he wrecked the government of his oppressors, and finds himself caught in the wreckage. If the thing works out in the way Germany hopes, the peasant stands simply to change masters. The peasant has been glorified by the Russian novelists for his quality of endurance, rather than for his accomplishments. His submission was extolled, and we gave his submission a wrong valuation. We pitied him, and he became a martyr in our eyes, with all the virtues that go with martyrdom. Freed of his chains, he mistook license for liberty, and we were shocked to find that he whom we regarded as a kind man who had been wronged, could only emulate his late masters in cruelty, murder and injustice to his own kind. It may be said that the people of Siberia, being the rudest of Russians, are not at all typical, and that as the Siberians are the descendants of exiles, or former exiles, they have experienced a degeneration which prevents them from being representative of the corresponding class in European Russia. There may be something in that idea. And I grant that judging the people of Siberia during a revolution, may be like judging the people of San Francisco while they were camping among the ruins of their city after the earthquake--that conditions were abnormal, and reduced to a primitive state. But if people seem to prefer being filthy to being clean, when the desirable condition calls for but little effort, it is obvious that in normal times, they were inherently filthy. And I experienced filth, day after day, in trains, railway restaurants and hotels, which I cannot hint at, much less describe. Sanitation is the beginning of civilization. When conductors on trains, and passengers on trains, will create and permit without protest, a condition of squalor and unsanitary conditions such as I saw, and which the wildest animal avoids, there is something wrong mentally with such a people. And when a suggestion that conditions might be improved is met by a stare of amazement that anyone should find these things revolting, one begins to wonder if government by a knout was not actually needed. But we know that the knout, censorship, repression, and the barriers against outside ideas and education are responsible for these conditions. These people are victims of a government that was criminal.