mericans
use the word, but most of them lacking a sense of national
responsibility. Throughout this long time, people have settled along the
rivers and lakes as natural avenues of transportation. They sought a
measure of independence and undisturbed and primitive comfort. Such they
found in this rather isolated country because it offered good hunting
and fishing, fertile land with plenty of wood, little possibility of
direct supervision or control by the government, refuge from political
or civil punishment, few or no taxes, escape from feudalism or from hard
industrial conditions, and--more recently--grants by the government of
free land with forestry privileges to settlers.

Notwithstanding all this, the Government of Archangel State, with its
hundreds of thousands of square miles, has never been self-supporting,
but has had to draw on natural resources in various ways for its
support. This has been done so that there is as yet not noticeable
depletion, and the people have remained so nearly satisfied--until
recently aroused by other inflammatory events--that it is safe to say
that no other larger section of the Russian Empire has been so free from
violence, oppression and revolution as has the North.

It has been so difficult to visit this northern region in detail that
knowledge of it has been scant and meagre. Although many reports have
been forwarded by United States agents to various departments of their
government ever since Russia began to disintegrate, such was the lack of
liaison between departments, and so great the disinclination to take
advantage of the information thus accumulated, that when the small body
of American troops was surprised by orders to proceed to North Russia
there was no compilation of information concerning their theatre of
operations available for them. An amusing error was actually made in the
War Department's ordering a high American officer to proceed to
Archangel via Vladivostok, which as a cursory glance at the map of the
world would discover, is at the far eastern, vostok means eastern, edge
of Siberia, thousands of miles from Archangel. And similar stories were
told by British officers who were ordered by their War Office to report
to Archangel by strange routes. England, who has lived almost next door
to North Russia throughout her history, and who established in the 16th
century the first trading post known in that country, seems to have been
in similar difficulties. The detai