Siberian peasants are supremely ignorant. In 1894 the Government of Tobolsk, the most progressive of any in respect of education, numbered only 19,100 children frequenting the schools out of a population of 1,400,000 souls. In the towns the proportion of scholars was 4·63 per 100, but in the country districts it did not rise to 1·05. One must not, however, be too severe on the Siberians for showing so poor an educational result, for we must not forget the enormous distance between village and village, and the difficulties of obtaining schoolmasters, owing mainly to the excessive ignorance in which the lower orders of Russians are plunged. Notwithstanding the very considerable progress which has been made in this direction in the last few years, there is probably no country in the world where reading and writing would be of greater advantage, for during at least one-half of the year the Siberian has literally nothing to do but to think, or, better, to dream, his life away. Serfdom has never existed in Siberia, which accounts for the Mujiks having a much more independent air than their brethren in European Russia. They have, however, in common with these latter, that peculiar sort of charity which has been well called the ‘pity of the Slav.’ It is, however, not an active virtue, but a sort of dreamy pitifulness which induces these poor people to help each other, but does not prevent them from being exceedingly suspicious of strangers. They will, however, invariably leave on the sill outside their windows a hunk of bread or a jug of milk for the benefit of some escaped convict or some wretched outcast. Unfortunately, however, the extreme ignorance and the innate laziness of these people prevent their extracting from the soil much that, at a very small cost of labour, would greatly increase both their wealth and their comfort.