In 1915 the writer of this article passed through Siberia to; Bergen and across the North Sea to England. We travelled by post train and had time to study the people and the country during the long waits at various stations. We were much impressed by the abundance of foodstuffs offered for sale at booths wherever the train stopped. There were sometimes as (many as ten different kinds of bread, plenty of butter, cream, milk, ham, eggs, etc., Siberia. far from being the poor country we had imagined, was then a land of. plenty reminding one strongly of the great Northwest of Canada. At one place, near Irkutsk, there were hundreds of covered cars, painted white, standing in long railway sidings. We inquired of a Russian fellow traveller what these were and he told us they were cars for the transport of butter. He said that no less than seven hundred tons of butter' were sent to England weekly. But,'' we said, we never heard of Russian butter in England." ''No,'' he replied, you call it Danish butter but _it really comes from Siberia." A gentleman recently returned from home tells us now that the majority of people in Britain are still eating margarine. A few wealthy people of the' working class and some fortunate unemployed, who have large families and get a correspondingly large dole, can afford to eat butter, but common folks like journalists, clergymen and others have to be content with margarine. And so there is dearth of good, wholesome butter in Europe and the Siberian peasant who used to export his surplus is sans boots, sans coat and almost sans everything. Such are the blessings of a Soviet government.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.