During the first two days of our return journey we had suffered from continual snow-storms and a leaden sky, but after leaving Irkutsk the weather improved, and the sun shone most of the time. The land is sparsely inhabited; at the close of the last century the density of population was given in the official census as _two_ to the square mile in the province of Irkutsk. If Siberia be taken as an example of the effects of land nationalisation, few people, I think, will be attracted by it; out of an area of 3,240,000,000 square miles no less than 3,104,000,000 belong to the State. There is only one province, the Amur region, in which land can be purchased. It is the Russian village communities who hold the land when it has been allotted for industrial enterprises. All along the line we were interested in seeing the colonists travelling to their various destinations; they were taken in slow trains densely packed, and when they came to the stations where they had to change they and their belongings were dumped down for an apparently indefinite number of hours on the station, and there they remained, eating and sleeping in the midst of their baggage till it was time to start afresh. There are sheds for them to be housed in when the weather prevents their being out of doors. They seemed to have practically no furniture with them, and some of them were remarkably well dressed in comparison with what one would have expected. They are all obliged to have passports just like foreigners. Up to the year 1901 there was an average of nearly 20,000 exiles sent yearly to Siberia; many of these exiles settled down and helped to civilise the land. They founded twelve Natural History and Ethnological Museums, besides starting scientific societies. Now the Government has altered the system, and great efforts are being made to send another class of colonists, the political exiles being driven to more uninhabitable regions. It seems a pity that the Russian Empire, which extends over an area of no less than one-sixth of the territorial globe, should leave this fertile land of Siberia, much of it the finest grazing ground in the world, and other parts excellent wheat-growing land, so sparsely inhabited, while it stretches envious hands into Manchuria, the land which China imperatively requires as the natural outlet for her surplus population.