In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given, wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing. It is again a credit that the governmental attitude to the industrial classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily. Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’ board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”