Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1888 — WHERE NIHILISTS ARE BRED. [ARTICLE]

WHERE NIHILISTS ARE BRED.

The Unspeakable Misery and Poverty of Russia’s Poor. St. Petersburg is European, and half the things Which pain one there are felt to be some sort of association with the evils and vices of the West. But Moscow has its own miseries, and they are so intensely Russian, so characteristic of that vaster Moscow of which the old capital is merely- the tiny centre, that, in becoming sensible of them one shudders; not for a community merely, but for a whole, people. The contrasts life offers in St. Petersburg are contrasts mainly between things which it is scarcely just to compare—between a well being which is foreign and a want that is native; but in Moscow' weafth is; the elder brother to poverty, yet stands divided from it by a chasm as impassable as it is merciless. There is a distinct alliance of roughness and semiculture, says Harper’s for August, be- < tween the rich merchant, who does business daily in the White Town, and the wretched street vender, whom he passes on his way a dozen times; yet the two are farther apart than the poorest and the richest classes in Western Europe. Moreover, poverty is so unspeakably miserable in Moscow that it seems, to .be the characteristic rather of a distinct species animal man than of any particularlpfeei: of the population. The streets daily yield figures which can only on general principles of anthropology be called human. The eye disentangles a face from these moving masses of rags but slowly and painfully; unless the inspection is at long range the nose itself is too apt to protest. The Russian summer calls innumerable peasant beggars and country paupers to Moscow. In the daytime they explore the city from gate- to gate, halting from time to time to beg alms or munch the fragments of black bread which form the chief spoils of their diurnal quest. Many women of this class are young and robust, fresh from the labors of the field, but some are old, infirm, haggaid. All trudge along with the aid of a staff, and all wear a rude canvas bag tied around the neck. At night, long after the last vesper has died away, when the White Town is deserted and the suburban residences

are gay with lights, music and with the laughter of happy men and women, this vast army of the penniless and the miserable seeks its nocturnal repose. Heaven alone knows where—on the forsaken field, of the day’s markets in the open air, on the steps of churches and cathedrals, or in the quadrangles and courts of palace and public buildings. To be unutterably wretched, and yet to be a nightly sojourner in the “outer courts of heaven;” to be poor and yet to fall asleep with only the thickness of a wall separating one from some of the most useless and costly accumulations of treasures in Europe, the conversion of which into money would furnish the means for banishing acute poverty from Russia altogether—such experiences as these are the lot of thousands to whom Moscow is less a place of pilgrimage than a centre of hot, weary, dusty life, a focus of burning despair.