All this Is from a railway carriage window. It professes to be no considered weighing up of the situation—it would be foolish 1f any such pretence were made. But impressions do mean a lot, specially when combined with much of what has been written in the past. How far, it might asked, has the doctrine of Soviet penetrated ~in Siberia. Who knows? Yet, perhaps, there are indications to be found in comparative ly.small things. The number of the younger people who wear some visible article of clothing in red, suggests, if that fact is any indication at all, that a very large proportion of the new generation is Communist at heart. That is but natural; they know nothing else except, perhaps, what heir parents taught them.
There are towns where the old Russian churches stand gaunt and bare, with the traditional cross which formerly surmounted their quaintly shaped cupolas removed. It looks if the old God had had to give place to the new pantheism. "There other towns in which' that supreme emblem of the faith still rises above the places of worship, suggesting that ouphe' opinion. in. support of the faith of its fathers is still such not to be outraged by any orbitary action such asa removal of the sign by which they live in the faith.
The Village Cemeteries Again there are the little village cemeteries. 'There are no rugged elms, no yew trees' shade for these little acres of God in the swelling bosom of the land near the railway. There ig not even a decent wall to mark ils limits, though a ragged fence of palings' serves to keep the cattle from straying over the last Festing.place of the rude village forefathers. Some of the smouldering heaps are unmarked. At the heads of a few a column painted scarlet tells of the political convictions the deceased held during his life. As if that mattered!
Over others the Greek cross tells in what earnest trust in the Divine the Soul which inherited the body below met the last stroke of fate. Some are new crosses, showing that even these days when the old glory has depa-ted, there are still those who honour its memory and the principles Which inspired it. Others' are old crosses, which have been. repel with new wood, a newness which suggests an obstinate clinging to the religion of the country's forebears, which persists despite the endeavours to supplant it by a acre materialist doctrine, by a faith @hich is no faith but merely a negation. in some places by the most primitive form of ploughing which knoweth not the valle of the straight line, nor the merit of defined order." Day after day the railway is carrying tractors" eastwards, occasionally ploughs, while some' are to be seen awaiting assembly at wayside stations. Threshing machines by the dozen are being sent into Siberia and the days of the thoroughly mechanized farm do not appear to be far distant, only '38 far away as the time required to fulda the apparent needs of so great a territory.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.