“We rose at Irkutsk, many of us, students and workmen, but General Müller had a strong garrison of troops here. We tried them, but they would not come over. They shot down our men and dispersed all the meetings, and now he is Governor in the Baltic Provinces. They say that when he was drunk, he would shoot accused men in his own railway carriage; “the butcher!” we of the Cause call him. At Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk the city was held for weeks by our party. The railway men would not run troop-trains and the Government was paralyzed. Chita was held by a Revolutionary Committee of Safety. We manned the entrances with artillery. We took turns watching, and ran the whole city, not touching the money in the Treasury. But we were few, and word came that the insurrection was everywhere broken. Müller was marching from Irkutsk, and Rennenkamp came back with the troops from Manchuria. He promised moderate terms to all but the leaders. The townspeople were afraid, and rose against our men. Many were taken. Many fled away and got to Japan and America. Some were shot and some were sent to the Yakutsk. So it was crushed, and our great chance was gone.”

“Will it come again?”

“Ni snaia! The workmen are ready. The intellectuals are ready. The peasants back in Russia cry for land. Perhaps they too will be ripe next time, and the soldiers will be with us. In any case Siberia has seen the red flag float over the Chita Republic.”

Many-faceted is the life in a Siberian city. In numerous ways it seems feverish and abnormal, for it represents the young blood of a capable race struggling upward, and knowing that in much its battle is desperate. The towns have hardly yet got settled methods; they are outgrown villages where men of all stamps, who have become enriched in the new land, come for the pleasures or the benefit of a less monotonous existence. The traditions of peasant origins survive in the conditions and general civic neglect.

Irkutsk, once its novelties have become familiar, has lost its charm. That it is provincial is no discredit, but its amusements are of the grosser order, unredeemed by wit. Every evening the tawdry dining-room at the hotel echoes the songs and noise of the revelers. The same circle attends the theatres. The students discuss hotly the rights of man and the Valhalla prepared for all martyrs, and calm simple wholesome life seems to be reserved for the workaday world which moves on its slow toilsome upward way in silence.

There is, however, to-night an unwonted stir at the Hôtel Métropole. The corridors are thronged. A Russian friend points out the notables. The blue-uniformed official yonder with the gray mustache and the row of glittering orders on his breast is the Governor-General. Half a dozen members of the local bar, in frock-coats, pass through. In the dining-room a young lieutenant, dashingly clad in long maroon coat with the row of silver-topped cartouches and the clattering sabre of the Emperor’s Cossack Guard, is being deferentially entertained by officers of the garrison. Three officials are taking champagne with two beautifully gowned women, Parisiennes even to their long pendant earrings. The hotel-pages in fresh red blouses and high boots pass here and there with messages. The waiters, with intensified deference, glide among the crowd in its many-colored uniforms and glittering war-medals.

“Who has arrived?” we ask, surveying the scene.

“A member of the Imperial Cabinet.”

The announcement of his name has a personal interest and memories of earlier stays in Russia.

The Minister’s life has been a romance indeed. Disagreeing with his family through liberal ideas, he went in 1862 to Birkenhead as a locomotive engineer, to the United States, to Argentine, and returning to Russia worked up from a very small government position to be chief of all the Russian roads, railways, and telegraphs, and Minister of Ways and Communications in the Czar’s Cabinet. His brain threw the line of rails over half a continent. On the outbreak of the Japanese War he was called from his retirement to the colossal task of bringing to the front across the width of Asia half a million men, their artillery and arms, their food, their transport, all on the one line of rails. He has served under three Emperors and is life-member of the Senate.

You send a card in through one of the attachés. In a few minutes there is delivered to you the Prince’s card, across which is written: “At noon.”

At the hour appointed you mount to the apartment overlooking the Bolshoiskaia. Guards at salute, staff in brilliant uniforms, secretaries and callers in full dress,—the antechambers are full. You pass through to the furthermost room.

In a nest of books and maps, with blue-prints outspread on floor and chairs and sofas, is an elderly man in a plain frock-coat, without a ribbon or a button to hint his honors. He is vigorous, hearty, simple, almost unchanged from your earlier acquaintance, his keen flashing eyes hinting ever a reverse side to the great repose of his manner.

Personal questions occupy the first minutes, but presently we are into larger themes, and you begin to feel subtly the man’s power. He has come on a special tour, to inspect, with his own practiced eyes, the projected double-tracking of the Siberian Railroad. Every brakeman and locomotive engineer, every traffic superintendent and division manager along the route knows he could step down from his private car and handle the levers and give them directions. His mind is a very vortex of ideas, and his range of conversation reflects world-wide interests. The talk gets to the American political situation and the race-problem. Later it shifts to the Japanese War, and he tells of some of his experiences getting the troops into Manchuria. A mention of the overland road to China awakens reminiscences.

“It was long before the railroad that I went over that route first,” he says. He tells of his months-long horseback ride beyond Baikal before the railroad went through, inspecting the trade-route and the prospects of the country. By and by the conversation has got to the special problems of the Slav. With the straightforward frankness of a great nature which wishes the best for his country, he tells of the Russian aspirations from the standpoint of those who are facing the problems of the nation in their fact and practice.

“I too,” he says, “was once for changing much in a little time, and worked to free the serfs and to start the elective Semstvos throughout the Empire. Alas! so much that they want is possible to no government! One cannot by enactment abolish want or bring all men to a niveau. We are trying to give every man the chance to rise, unchecked by any administrative barrier. But one sees as he lives longer that all which one wishes cannot come at a coup. Great changes, great improvements, I have witnessed, but they have not come by violence. We must keep order, and hand on to our sons an undivided Empire of the Russias.”

You leave this patient builder of the new order alone amid his maps and studies in the idle Sunday city. As you descend the steps, a black-capped student passes the door. He is humming the forbidden Marseillaise.