paratively few in Russia, and those few were in other parts, distant long journeys on the railway-and the nearest railway was forty versts away from this village. And other starving villages, as I knew, had no railway within a hundred or five hundred versts.

“And the money for the trains?" they continued. "And for our food on the journey, and while we search? Here in the village we have barely anything to eat, but when we leave the village we shall have nothing at all. Tell uswhere shall we get the money?"

land, cash down of course, for the next year at a tenth and a fifteenth of its regular rental. And some were selling their next year's crop from their land: bargaining to plow their fields, sow them with their own seed, tend, harvest, and deliver the crop to the buyer, all for a dollar an acre. These men did not think of what monstrous usury they were begging to pay; they did not think of how, horseless and without a kopek toward a horse's price, they could plow their fields, nor of the new crisis they would face in the autumn, even if the harvest were good.

And they said, "Already we have sold all."

Yes, they had sold all! There was not another word left us, and we turned away. They were right; for them there was nothing but to remain in their village to starve, and see their people

starve.

We went through barnyard after barnyard. All were utterly empty-save in one here and there we found the barely vital framework of a dwarfish horse or cow.

And through house after house; and if for the contents of most houses I had paid a dollar, I should have been giving charity. Yes, they had sold all! Their horses they had sold, some to neighboring Tartars, also starving, who ate horseflesh, but most to hide dealers, who bought merely for the skins. Three dollars apiece was the price. Their fleshless cattle they had sold at a similar rate. Their sheep had gone for fifty cents and a dollar, and some had been exchanged for half their weight in flour. The peasants had sold this meat instead of eating it, because they are almost wholly vegetarians. Black bread-that is the only food. And they sold not only because there was nothing on which they could live, but because there was nothing on which the stock could live. It had to be sold, or lost entirely.

And they had sold not only the present. They were selling the future-offering any bargain that would gain them bread. Many had sold to landlords and a few richer peasants, for immediate cash, their labor for the next summer at a third the usual rate. Some were renting their

get through the day and get through the

morrow.

As it was in this village, so was it in thousands of others. And in one, a Tartar village in the neighboring province of Kazan, the stripped people had been driven into yet another variety of despair-bargain. An enterprising buyer of women for the brothels of Constantinople came into the village, selected what pleased him and made his offer. The peasants had nothing else; they were hunger-mad-and when the dealer went away he took with him the eight most beautiful girls of the village. For them he had paid from fifty to seventyfive dollars apiece-prices that Constantinople would richly multiply. Very likely this dealer, or his brethren, have been buying for their market in other villages, for the opportunity is too rare a one for their business acumen to miss. But this I do not know.

Yes, the village we saw has sold its allall but its daughters. As we clambered into our sleigh to leave, the crowd pressed about us-men, women, children-famine-eaten, blackly despairing, yet newly hopeful. To them, as I have said, we represented the far-off outside world from which might come help. All God's blessing upon us !—would we not have pity and send them bread? The men stood with bared heads; some of the women were crying, some even kneeling in the snow. And as we drove away their voices went up, sobbing frantically, prayerful, in a last appeal.

"Do not forget us !" they cried. "Do not forget the hungry ones!"

Our galloping horses swept us over a

vast stretch of land, treeless to the end of the eye's reach, and as flat as a frozen lake. Here and there were weeds, richly plumed with snow, that had escaped the peasants' gleaning; these alone relieved the flat whiteness that went on and on till it entered the grayish blue of the horizon. As we glided along, my mind. ran back to questions I had asked about the quality of the Government's flour and the answer that had been given me. The flour was most infamously adulterated with earth, with every costless alloy known to commissarial thieves. It often had no more than fifty per cent. of the proper nutritive value. So the half-pound of bread was really but a quarter.

This we had been told elsewhere again and again. It is notorious throughout Russia that the famine fund is a rich source of "graft" to those who have control of its expenditure. Officials, contractors, sub-contractors, all dip in their hands, and dip deeply. The officials get their share by awarding contracts to the highest briber, the briber his by delivering rotten flour. Or the two establish an underground partnership, which is usually conducted on this plan: The official arranges with the contractor to deliver to a certain district, say, a million poods of flour (a pood is forty pounds) for a million and a half of rubles. The contractor sends half a million poods of flour, and mixed with it half a million poods of some adulterant, and there is a matter of several hundred thousand rubles to be divided between the partners of which the smaller share goes not to the official. And the show-girls and champagne dealers of Paris are the happier, even if the peasants are not.

The Government, until the last few weeks, has done nothing to stop this robbery of famine bread-not charity bread, if you please, for it is the peasants' own, paid for by their taxes. But recently the frauds have roused so tremendous a scandal that the Government could no longer refrain from taking notice. A commission was appointed to investigate. The guilty, with indignant virtue, threw blame upon others; the systemless business methods of an irresponsible bureaucracy made proof and conviction impos

sible, and the situation remains practically what it was before. The Government has no time for such matters-has no time to govern; has time and energy only to try to crush, by every manner of relentless violence, the growing spirit of liberty.

The Government's favorite method of remedying an evil condition is to deny the condition's existence. What is cheaper and easier?-and what better calculated to keep Russia's borrowing power strong among the nations? During the terrible famine of 1891, much less terrible than this year's, one means the Government took to relieve the situation was to forbid the use of the word "hunger." A heavy penalty was attached. to its use, being in the case of newspapers suspension on the third occurrence of the word. Close your eyes, and there is no evil! This year the Government has recognized the existence of the famine by its grant to the starving districts of sixty-five million dollars-far, far too little-and even admits that greater hunger Russia never knew. But, after all, says officialdom, no one is suffering; everybody will pull through nicely. And the peasants' daily half pound continues to be half earth.

The latter part of the journey to the next village was lighted only by the moon, in a double halo of incandescent gold and pink. In this village also the priest led us among his people, and here also there was nothing. The first house sheltered sixteen people-twelve adults and four children. In the "red" corner, the light of a tiny hanging lamp in her wasted face, sat a young mother with a baby in her arms. The baby, as were the other children, was thin, white; and was weakly suckling at a shriveled breast. We asked the mother how much food the house received. It seemed an effort for her even to raise her eyes, and her voice was a meager whisper. "For three," she said.

Three pounds for sixteen people-a fifth of a pound apiece. No wonder the empty breast!

In the next house we found an old mother, her unmarried daughter, a daughter-in-law, and the latter's child. The young husband had set forth into the