The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues: “For five years I farmed, and though I had a German overseer, I did not prosper. So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a tramway. The men of the city said, ‘Are all the horses dead? He of the spectacles is mad.’ Yet by importunity I got them to give me the right to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, ‘Here is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?’ “‘We will, we will,’ said the Belgians. “From them I got a hundred and eighty thousand roubles clear, and an interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen, and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits were yet to come, the people said, ‘Shall foreigners oppress our city?’ So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the Government come after them later. It is _hudoo_ (bad).” “But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast money from the people?” says the railroad official. “For me, I think the Government should do it all.” “_Ni snaia_, I don’t know,” says the contractor. “But I who bought stocks with the Belgians’ money (foolishly thinking that the business which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will not give again to the stock-people the money I shall make from the oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now.” “But,” says the railway chinovnik, “does not the State do these things better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Collins, an Angleski, came proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they but one. Who other than the Government could spend a billion roubles for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future?” “Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this! But it was such as I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the money to support it now got from the peasants’ taxes while so many clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour for the mail-trains, thirty-five versts for the express. One can go eighty versts in Europe.”