In a country crossed by several large rivers as is this hungry country--the Volga, the Don, the Kama, and many little streams--an irrigation system might easily be introduced. The proposition is a perfectly simple one from an engineer’s point of view. The question is, who should undertake the work? The peasants can not, the great landlords who are rich will not, and the government is too thoroughly honeycombed with corruption to ever consider a plan of this kind. That such a scheme must eventually be resorted to there is no doubt. Under existing conditions there is a partial famine in several of these provinces every year while the whole area is annually exposed to such dreadful famine as marked the years 1892 and 1906. When I passed out of Simbirsk I had covered one more stage of our journey down the Volga, before turning eastward across the country toward Ural and Siberia. This [Illustration: Starving peasants in a Tartar village] brought me to Samara. Ever since leaving Moscow I had been chiefly interested in the peasants and their change of attitude since the Duma had come into existence, but in Samara I could have thought for nothing save the famine. I had read of famines and thought I knew about what to expect in a starving land, but the depressing reality of the suffering, the heroic, despairing battles to prolong life even a little while, had never before come so close to me. From the city of Samara I made journeys in three directions--across the Volga and west, south, and east. In all of the starving villages I passed through the same heartrending scenes were repeated--food supplies absolutely exhausted; thatch being torn from the roofs to feed to the horses and cattle; families doubling up, i.e., the occupants of one house moving over into a neighbor’s in order to use the first house for fuel; relief kitchens so short of relief that only one meal in two days could be dispensed; _during the forty-seven hours between meals the people lay prostrate on their backs so as to conserve every particle of strength_; parents deserting their children because they could not bear to watch them die. Why is this suffering visited upon thirty millions of people who are powerless to help themselves? Their oppressors are blessed with material prosperity. The very flour dispensed by the government is flagrantly adulterated in order that corrupt officials may glean a few thousand more rubles to spend on their dancing-girls and French champagne. The Russian famine frauds have been sources of graft these many years, and members of the government as high up as the assistant minister of interior[18] implicated in the scandals. The morning I arrived from Simbirsk the Samara newspapers published in prominent positions the following announcement: “Whoever donates one ruble and a half (seventy-five cents) saves a man from starvation one month.”