of the deepest significance. The railroad in Asia has come
to stay; and with its coming the barbarism of the past is nearing its
end. The sleeping giant of Orientalism is stirring uneasily in its bed,
its drowsy senses stirred by the shrill alarum of the locomotive
whistle. New ideas and new habits must follow in the track of the iron
horse. The West is forcing itself into the East, with all its restless
activity. In the time to come this whole broad continent is destined to
be covered with railroads as with a vast spider-web; new industries will
be established, machinery introduced, and the great region of the
steppes, famous in the past only as the starting-point of conquering
migrations, must in the end become an active centre of industry, the
home of peace and prosperity, a new-found abiding-place of civilization
and human progress.

_AN ESCAPE FROM THE MINES OF SIBERIA._

The name Siberia calls up to our minds the vision of a stupendous
prison, a vast open penitentiary larger than the whole United States, a
continental place of captivity which for three centuries past has been
the seat of more wretchedness and misery than any other land inhabited
by the human race. To that far, frozen land a stream of the best and
worst of the people of Russia has steadily flowed, including prisoners
of state, religious dissenters, rebels, Polish patriots, convicts,
vagabonds, and all others who in any way gave offence to the authorities
or stood in the way of persons in power.

Not freedom of action alone, but even freedom of thought, is a crime in
Russia. It is a land of innumerable spies, of secret arrest and rapid
condemnation, in which the captive may find himself on the road to
Siberia without knowing with what crime he is charged, while his
friends, even his wife and family, may remain in ignorance of his fate.
Every year a convoy of some twenty thousand wretched prisoners is sent
off to that dismal land, including the ignorant and the educated, the
debased and the refined, men and women, young and old, the horror of
exile being added to indescribably by this mingling of delicate and
refined men and women with the rudest and most brutal of the convict
class, all under the charge of mounted Cossacks, well armed, and bearing
long whips as their most effective arguments of control.

It may be said here that the misery of this long journey on foot has
been somewhat mitigated since the introduction of railroads and
s