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These two gentlemen reached Pskov about nine o'clock that evening. Half an hour before they came, the Tsar sent an aide-de-camp to get his telegrams from Ruzsky; but Ruzsky kept them, sending by the aide-de-camp to the Tsar a telegram from Petrograd containing serious reports of the situation there. Ruzsky intended to inquire personally of Gouchkov and Shulgin the object of their mission; but the Tsar directed that they come immediately to him. When Ruzsky entered the Tsar's private car, Gouchkov and Shulgin were already present, but the Tsar was not there. However, he arrived a moment later, and told the two deputies that he had already abdicated.

Immediately after this declaration, Ruzsky returned to the Tsar the dispatches which he had written in the course of the day, and of which he had made copies.

Gouchkov and Shulgin were disconcerted by the news that the Tsar had already abdicated, and requested time to consider the situation created by his unexpected act.

About one A.M. on March 16, Ruzsky, Gouchkov, and Shulgin left the Tsar, who had just signed a double manifesto

of abdiction in his own name and the name of the heir to the throne. The document was countersigned by Frederic. One of the two copies was entrusted to Gouchkov, who gave a written receipt for it. The text of the manifesto had been drafted at the Grand Headquarters and telegraphed to Pskov before Gouchkov and Shulgin reached the latter city.

This manifesto was at once telegraphed to Rodzianko and to Alexeyev, and sent to a printing office to be printed and promulgated.

That same night Rodzianko wired directly to Ruzsky, informing him that during the fifteenth of March a military revolt had broken out in Petrograd and a constitutional convention would be summoned. Therefore, he asked that the manifesto be not promulgated, and his request was granted.

However, at six o'clock the following morning, March 16, the manifesto was promulgated by order of the Grand Headquarters.

Thus finished the reign of Nicholas II, the Tsar who might have played such a grand rôle in history but, instead, left to future generations merely the tragic memory of a martyr.

SOME BALTIC CAPITALS

From Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 19
(SWISS LIBERAL REPUBLICAN DAILY)

CLOSE to the border an express train would cover the distance in an hourlies lies Kovno, the new capital of Lithuania. It has none of the features of a Western seat of government. It is a middle-class Russian countrytown, a sprawling village of dirty cottages and low business buildings, with façades that suggest cheap theatres. One's first impression is of a town. where hucksters and second-hand dealers make a precarious living trading with each other. The freshly varnished look that other new European capitals have hastened to acquire, ostensibly to impress foreign diplomats but really to gratify the gentlemen in possession of the government, is entirely absent.

Probably the Lithuanians consider it more profitable to leave the diplomats to their ennui. When they set up their new government, they were helped by numerous home-comers from America, whose ideas of state-building had been acquired in the Wild West. Their government offices occupy plain, unpretentious, middle-class residences, and employ a most modest quota of officials. Government machinery exhibits the frugality and thrift which characterize the whole nation.

When I was last in Kovno, just after the German troops left two years ago, I observed this new capital-village with surprise, and said: 'Are n't you going to build a new seat of government? You can't develop a national culture in a village.'

The Lithuanians explained that they must first solve more pressing economic problems, restore business to normal,

and let the nation's capital come as the fruit of their regained prosperity. When I returned a few months later, the desolate ragged men in charge of affairs had been converted into conventional Europeans. Our Berlin clothing manufacturers have found new customers here. The poverty-pinched faces of the people had blossomed out into blooming, healthy countenances. But the town itself, with its log huts and dirty little shops, was unchanged. Men said: "The high cost of construction makes it unwise to start building

now.'

Somewhat later, a natural calamity put an end to this policy of Spartan self-denial. A few weeks ago, a great conflagration destroyed one whole section of the town. Only a few chimneys are left of the wooden houses which covered the district between the railway station and the principal business street. Ten thousand people were rendered homeless; so the government had to do something. Engineers returning from America have prepared plans for re-building this section. It is assumed that modern structures of brick and stone will replace the former wooden houses, and make this part of the city the future business and civic

centre.

Quite a different picture is presented by the capitals of Lettland and Esthonia, where Teutonic knights and Hansa merchant princes centuries ago built glorious churches and noble palaces. Reval and Riga possess ancient buildings around which hovers

the memory of great events and great traditions. However, their present masters were not their builders.

The Reval Foreign Office seems out of place in the old palace of the Teutonic Order. Seven hundred years ago, the Danes defeated the Esthonian army on Cathedral Hill and reduced the people to serfdom. At the same point to-day, the history of a free nation is being written. This well symbolizes the proverbial doggedness, the patient endurance of the nation, qualities which are the best guaranty of their new government's success. The Esthonians are attacking the weighty and unfamiliar tasks before them with the untaught confidence of youth. Great harbor cranes are being erected along the city wharves, though no man knew, when they were ordered, that within a year the port would be unable to handle the tremendous transit trade with Soviet Russia. Ships crowd against ship in the modern but diminutive harbor, and thousands of laborers swarm along the quays unloading vessels. Cranes and winches are incessantly creaking and groaning. Across the wharves stretch long rows of Russian railway cars, freshly painted in bright red, with the official initials of the Soviet Republic: R.S.F.S.R.

Darting about among them are the automobiles of the innumerable Soviet commissioners and trade attachés. And, by the way, the representatives of the Proletarian Republic are rated hard taskmasters by the wharf-workers. Outside the harbor lie other full-laden ships, waiting for their turn at the wharves. The whole waterside typifies immense tasks so suddenly imposed that they cannot be handled — and in this respect is a symbol of the Esthonian government. The authorities now plan an ambitious enlargement of the harbor, to make it adequate for all future demands. But they have not

considered whether the present rush of business will prove permanent, or whether it may not have vanished by the time these works are finished.

This flood of import trade has revolutionized the whole town. What was formerly the residential quarter of rich German Baltic merchants and manor lords has suddenly become an exclusively business section. The newly-rich merchant princes are building villas in the suburbs, in imitation of English country houses. Most of the old graces and elegances of life have vanished. The hotels have become cabarets, where second-class actors and singers from Odessa or Saratoff entertain foreign sailors and shipmasters. The latter spend lavishly the mountains of Esthonian money which they receive in exchange for a dollar or a pound sterling. Cabaret singers, acrobats, dancers, jugglers, boxers, and - latest novelty of all-bull-fighters, have thronged here to entertain these foreign seafolk.

Meanwhile, the Esthonians plod along at their daily tasks, indifferent to this foreign carnival, with that Northern absence of temperament which they share with their kinsfolk, the Finns.

The Letts, who are racially distinct from the Esthonians, have always been more ready to assimilate with their neighbors. Under the Tsars they acquired many Russian traits, especially the jovial, winning manner of their rulers. For the same reason, they, in turn, reacted more strongly on Russian life. Their capital, Riga, is an ancient centre of culture, and they have had a broad basis there upon which to build since they achieved self-government. Although they have been independent only two years, and have been harried by revolts, invasions, and a Bolshevist interregnum, they already have a good opera and an excellent ballet. At the

National Theatre, Lett popular plays are presented. These resemble Russian popular plays in their tenderness and naturalness. The people are as hospitable as the Russians, and have thrown their capital open to every other nation. Here, too, the crews and masters of foreign vessels amuse themselves in the harbor cafés after the Reval fashion; but the Letts, instead of going their way apart like the Esthonians, mingle with their stranger-guests and the numerous Russian refugees who have found sanctuary in their capital. The latter

now call the Dvina metropolis 'Little Petrograd.' The government encourages them to spend their money freely, and they welcome the privilege, trying to forget in the revelry of the Lett capital the nightmare from which they have escaped at home. You find them at 8 P.M. in the opera, at 11 P.M. supping in a fashionable restaurant, at 1 A.M. in some fashionable gambling-parlor; then the long procession of taxis starts down Elizabeth and Suvorov streets, where the bright lights of cabarets and dancing-halls burn till dawn.

UNVISITED JAPAN. I

BY J. W. ROBERTSON SCOTT

From The Daily Telegraph, August 1, 6, 8 (INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE)

THE name of Yamaguchi prefecture, which is at the extreme southwest of the mainland, is not so familiar as the name of its port, Shimoneseki. I propose to set down some notes of a journey by ricksha, motor, and afoot, from Yamaguchi along the northern coastline, where there was no railway, to Matsue, forever famous as the home of Lafcadio Hearn.

At our first stopping-place, I saw a photograph showing a Buddhist priest engaged with school girls in tree-planting. Not only schools and young men's associations, but other organizations, acquire merit by helping the good work of reafforestation. Floods, due to the denudation of the hills of trees, do an enormous amount of damage. The imagination of the tourist is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan, and that within a twelve

month fires may destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but floods cause much greater loss of life and property. Every year on an average floods drown 600 people and cause a money loss of a million and a quarter yen. These appalling figures do not include the loss of life by typhoons and tidal waves.

I visited an ex-governor in retirement in a hamlet. He was living very comfortably on £150 a year; but that was in the early days of the war. It is almost incredible how cheaply people could live in Japan in the old days. A little more than a quarter of a century ago, the family of a friend of mine, now of high rank, was living in a county town on ten shillings and sixpence a month. There were two adults and three children. Rent was half a crown and the rice bill was nearly four shillings.

I stopped to watch a farmer's wife and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in slightly different patterns all over Japan. It is the successor of a somewhat similar contrivance of bamboo stakes. The women told me that one of them could thresh fourteen bushels a day. The steel implement cost five shillings from traveling vendors, but only half that from the cooperative store, and, happily, rural Japan is full of coöperative stores. While we talked, the farmer appeared. I remember that I apologized to him for unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn, that is, the grooved timber in which the sliding doors run. It is considered to be an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold, as in some way 'standing on the householder's head.' But, as I was a young man, he viewed my ill manners lightly. This man had a bamboo plantation, and he told me that the bamboo would shoot up at the rate of more than a foot in twenty-four hours. (Last month I measured the growth of a shoot of a Dorothy Perkins rose, and found that it averaged about a quarter of an inch in twenty-four hours.)

We ate our lunch one day in the headman's room in the village office. Hanging from the ceiling was the sealed envelope, to be opened on receipt of a telegram. Some member of the village staff always slept in that room. The envelope contained instructions to be acted upon if mobilization took place. Among odds and ends of information which the headman gave me was a fact about grave-digging. If there was in the neighborhood no member of a 'special tribe,' to which grave-digging was usually relegated, it was the duty of neighbors to dig graves. A community's displeasure was marked by neighbors refraining from helping to dig an unpop

ular person's grave. (One might have expected to hear that such a grave would be dug with alacrity.) Families which had run counter to public opinion had to apologize before they could get neighborly help at the burial of their dead.

I was wakened one morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite the inn, and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill fame. The old Shinto idea was that, at other times than festivals, prayers might be made anywhere, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only. Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray; but in the case of the other half the 'worship' is 'no more than a motion of respect.'

At a county town I found a library of 4000 volumes. They were largely an inheritance from the feudal régime, and included almost no foreign books. Wherever I went in Japan I could not but note the clusters of readers at the open fronts of bookshops. It is not generally known that the percentage of illiteracy in Japan is lower than that of the United States. This fact is the more striking when it is remembered that the ideographs greatly prolong the educational course. The fact reminds one of Professor Gilbert Murray's remark that English spelling entails a loss of one year in the child's school time. In the Japanese elementary school course no more than 1300 ideographs are used. The newspapers employ about 2000, and are trying to reduce the number,

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