This medley of races beneath the Russian banners gives to one’s earliest contact the conception of a heterogeneous disorganized jumble of nations and peoples. But closer acquaintance impresses upon one the dominating and surviving qualities innate in the Slav, whose unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types of aboriginal tribes and exiled sectarians. By race-absorption, like that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxon, and Norsemen into English; British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav is dissolving, transmuting to his own type and moulding to his own institutions the varied peoples. Though the heterogeneous blood adds to the total of Siberian country life, it is the Slavic race that determines the permanent order of this great land. Primarily too it is the peasantry who shape its destiny. Their possibilities are the limit of Russia’s ascent. Their condition is therefore of far deeper than sightseeing interest to the student. Unlike the picturesque peasantry of Holland, here they are the foundations of the state, forming not an insignificant minority but ninety per cent of the population. Somewhat of a new spirit flickers here and there in Siberian hamlets. The peasant is superior to his Russian brother. The traditions of serfdom were broken by his severance from the old environment, and wider lands give him an abundance unknown save in a few favored parts of Europe. The political exiles have through the centuries added an upsurge of independence and personal self-consciousness, which is markedly higher than the Oriental humility of Occidental Russia. The influence of the criminal, as distinct from the political convict, is felt primarily in the cities, such as Irkutsk and Vladivostok, to which the time-expired men drift. The convict element is always met with. It has been customary to billet a condemned, who was not wanted at home, upon some out-of-the-way village, giving him a passport for its confines alone. The victim might have been a Moscow professor or a locomotive engineer, but in the Mir he must farm the land given him. Naturally such seed as this planted in Siberian hamlets does not produce the traditional peasant faith in God and the Czar so faithfully preached by the popes. Another influence making for upheaval is the returning recruit. We are in a peasant house when a _soldat_ comes back to the family from his service. If he has not brought any great burden of salary, he has accumulated tales enough of the outer world to hold in breathless excitement the circle of friends and relatives which gathers at once when the tinkling sleigh-bells and the barking have announced to the village his return.