Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded stockades. Murderers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has banished to the far Yakutsk. Closer study gives, too, a better appreciation of the railroad’s economic significance. The line holds a strategic position as truly as does the Panama Canal. Though in Siberia proper there is the enormous area of nearly five million square miles, so much of this is in Arctic tundra, impassable swamp, forest, or barren steppe, that the really habitable and arable land narrows down to a tenth of this, which lies in general between the parallels of 55° and 58° 30’ north, and is contained within a belt some thirty-five hundred miles long and two hundred to two hundred and fifty miles broad. When it is noted that the tillable area of one hundred and ninety-two thousand square miles in Tobolsk and Tomsk, mostly along the Obi System, the stretch of twenty thousand miles in the steppe, and that of one hundred thousand in the Yeneseik and Irkutsk governments of eastern Siberia, are all in immediate proximity to the railroad, whose course is generally along the 55th parallel, the economic value of Russia’s great enterprise takes a different perspective. Its vantage is still more emphasized when the element of the north and south watercourses is considered. One after another the great Siberian rivers are crossed,--in the Tobolsk Gobernia, the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtish; in the Tomsk Gobernia, the Obi and the Tom; in Yeneseik, the Yenesei; in Irkutsk, the Angara. Each of these reaches far up into the agricultural zone that lies north of the railroad, bringing the harvests to its cars by the cheap unfettered water-avenues. Thus, to the part of Siberia that is capable of extensive development, the railroad is even now in a position to give great aid.