I had frequently seen reports like this in the newspapers before this time, but they had a new significance for me now that I had visited the border country where this commerce with what has been called the "Underground" or "Revolutionary" Russia was part of the daily experience of the people. It all recalled to my mind the stories I had heard, when I was a boy, from my mother's lips of the American Underground Railway and the adventures of the runaway slaves in their efforts to cross the border between the free and slave states. It reminded me, also, of the wilder and more desperate struggles, of which we used to hear whispers in slavery time, when the slaves sought to gain their freedom by means of insurrection. That was a time when, in the Southern States, no matter how good the relations between the individual master and his slaves, each race lived in constant fear of the other. It is in this condition, so far as I can learn, that a great part of the people in Russia are living to-day, for it is fatally true that no community can live without fear in which one portion of the people seeks to govern the other portion through terror. The Austrian and Russian border at Barany, the village at which we had now arrived, is not imposing. A wire fence, and a gate such as is sometimes used to guard a railway crossing, are all that separate one country from the other. On one side of this gate I noticed a little sentinel's box, marked in broad stripes, with the Austrian colours, and at the other end of the gate there was a similar little box marked in broad stripes, with the Russian colours. On the Austrian side there was a large building for the use of the customs officials. On the Russian side there was a similar building with the addition of a large compound. In this compound there were about twenty Russian soldiers, standing idly about, with their horses saddled and bridled. The reason for the presence of the soldiers on the Russian side of the border was due to the fact that it is the business of the customs officers not merely to collect the tolls on the commerce that crosses the border at this point, but to prevent any one entering or leaving the country. As Russia imposes an almost prohibitive tax on emigration, most of the Russian emigrants are smuggled across the border. At the same time it is necessary to closely guard the frontier in order to prevent, as I have said, the importation of books and bombs, the two elements in western civilization of which Russia seems to stand most in fear.