intense misery of Russian peasants and
the squalor in which they live they should remember that Russia is a
large country, that it possesses a North and a South, an East and a
West, and that what is true about one place is quite untrue about
another." I shall be quite prepared, therefore, to be told by people who
know Russia far better than I can ever hope to do, that their experience
has been altogether different from my own, and I shall not dream of
questioning or doubting the truth of what they say as far as their own
experience goes.

In this vast area of which we are thinking there must indeed be great
varieties of experience and conditions of life, and it is not contrary
to what one might expect to find much nearer home, that the people of
one village may be clean in their habits and those of another quite the
reverse. But from all I have seen, heard, and read the Russian labouring
and peasant class have a great desire to be clean. Nor is this a new
thing at all in the national life. It is nearly forty years ago since
Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace told us, in the first edition of his work,
of the important part taken by the weekly vapour-bath in the life of the
Russian peasantry, and described "the public bath possessed by many
villages." How many villages of our own, even now, have a public bath?
And how many of our own peasantry dream of having what is a perfectly
ordinary and weekly habit of the Russians--the bath in his own house?

My Russian and Siberian friends tell me how they have always to arrange
for their domestic servants to get a good bath, before they change for
Sunday, every Saturday afternoon and evening. Mr. Rothay Reynolds says
the same: "My friend took me to see his bath-house. Russians are
exceedingly clean. In villages one may see a row of twenty cottages,
and, thirty yards from them, a row of twenty bath-houses. The one the
peasant showed me was a hut with a stove intended to heat the great
stones placed above it. On bath nights the stove is lit, and when the
stones are hot a bucket of water is thrown on them, so that the place is
filled with steam. The bather lies on a bench in the suffocating
atmosphere, soaps himself, and ends his ablutions with ice-cold water.
In town and country it is held to be a religious duty to take a
steam-bath once a week. Servants ask if they can go out for a couple of
hours to visit one of the great baths in the cities. They go away with
clean linen bound up in