seed can be sown, and the pioneer colonists have
to work hard for a year or two before they get any return for their
labour; but the Government and private societies come to their
assistance, and for the last twenty years their numbers have been
steadily increasing. During the ten years 1886-96 the annual contingent
rose from 25,000 to 200,000, and the total number amounted to nearly
800,000. For the subsequent period I have not been able to obtain the
official statistics, but a friend who has access to the official sources
of information on this subject assures me that during the last twelve
years about four millions of peasants from European Russia have been
successfully settled in Siberia.

Even in the European portion of the Empire millions of acres which are
at present unproductive might be utilised. Any one who has travelled by
rail from Berlin to St. Petersburg must have noticed how the landscape
suddenly changes its character as soon as he has crossed the frontier.
Leaving a prosperous agricultural country, he traverses for many weary
hours a region in which there is hardly a sign of human habitation,
though the soil and climate of that region resembles closely the soil
and climate of East Prussia. The difference lies in the amount of labour
and capital expended. According to official statistics the area of
European Russia contains, roughly speaking, 406 millions of dessyatins,
of which 78 millions, or 19 per cent., are classified as neudobniya,
unfit for cultivation; 157 millions, or 39 per cent., as forest; 106
millions, or 26 per cent., as arable land; and 65 millions, or 16 per
cent., as pasturage. Thus the arable and pasture land compose only 42
per cent., or considerably less than half the area.

Of the land classed as unfit for cultivation--19 per cent. of the
whole--a large portion, including the perennially frozen tundri of the
far north, must ever remain unproductive, but in latitudes with a milder
climate this category of land is for the most part ordinary morass or
swamp, which can be transformed into pasturage, or even into arable
land, by drainage at a moderate cost. As a proof of this statement I
may cite the draining of the great Pinsk swamps, which was begun by the
Government in 1872. If we may trust an official report of the progress
of the works in 1897, an area of 2,855,000 dessyatins (more than seven
and a half million acres) had been drained at an average cost of about
three shillings an a