Out of the commonplace of 2 refugee gathering it is decidedly dificult to construct the picture of a maelstrom such as the Siberian. Modern dress does not lend anything of the picturesque to the show. In a different century rags and tatters might have conjured up interest in a drama being enacted hundreds of miles away, but to-day the tendency is to get down to one dead level where refugee and non-refugee are scarcely distinguishable. It is not even a case of collecting the great up-washed, as the scarcity of soap in certain belligerent countries might have once suggested. The casual observer misses all the signs which would suggest to him the flotsam of a great overturning, but the same interest which each revolution of the past must have spired is present to-day just as much as ever it was.
Get beneath the surface, and there is all this interest in the refugees from Siberia at present in Shanghai. Look at them with the casual glance of the man in the street, and they are simply a few more units of cosmopolitan population, Which being the case, it is the more necessary to probe into their history to give the people of Shanghai an idea of who and what they are, and to awaken and sustain an interest in how they are tended. And while opposing in-torest in the politics of Russia may sway individual opinion this way and that, there should emerge one tolerably clear line of policy in dealing with them now that they are in Shanghai.
Our oF tHe INFERNO.
In the old Kelly & Walsh build. ing next to Wayfoong a varied crowd of these refugees are fed twice a day, and a rather wonderful organization displays itself. As they roll in for the first time they are registered and the facts about them recorded. Thus the committee—in reality Mr. Wolfe sand his associates—are able to tell the world about them, especially when the world has a job to offer them. This will prevent the attempt to fit square refugees into round jobs, but it has another aspect.
"See that man over there, the one standing up?" is more or less whispered to the interested inquirer.
"Well, he had his father shot by one side in Siberia and his mother by the other."
And the unconscious object of an interested group was just an ordi nary, clean-looking young man. well enough dressed. Nothing about him to suggest that he had just escaped from the scene of such a pitiful tragedy. That is the terrible part of the business. With
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.