The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

He stopped abruptly as we spoke to him, and turned his black, piercing eyes upon us. Without saying a word he took the passports, glanced them through rapidly, tapped them with the back of his hand, and handed them back to us.

"That is no passport," he said, and then he added, "it should have the visé of your consul."

Having said this much he turned abruptly, without waiting for further conversation, and strode on. We soon came up with and passed him, but he did not look up. A little later we halted at the border. I looked around to see what had become of our wandering Jew, but he had disappeared. Perhaps he had stopped at the inn, and perhaps he had his own way of crossing the border.

I was reminded of this strange figure a few months later when I noticed in one of the London papers a telegram from Vienna to the effect that some thirty persons had been arrested at Cracow who were suspected of being the ringleaders "in what is believed to be a widespread revolutionary organization of Russian refugees." The report added that "a whole wagon-load of Mannliches rifles, Browning pistols, and dynamite grenades, together with a large number of compromising documents and plans of military works, were seized as a result of searches by the police in the houses of the arrested men."

I had frequently seen reports like this in the newspapers before this time, but they had a new significance for me now that I had visited the border country where this commerce with what has been called the "Underground" or "Revolutionary" Russia was part of the daily experience of the people. It all recalled to my mind the stories I had heard, when I was a boy, from my mother's lips of the American Underground Railway and the adventures of the runaway slaves in their efforts to cross the border between the free and slave states. It reminded me, also, of the wilder and more desperate struggles, of which we used to hear whispers in slavery time, when the slaves sought to gain their freedom by means of insurrection. That was a time when, in the Southern States, no matter how good the relations between the individual master and his slaves, each race lived in constant fear of the other. It is in this condition, so far as I can learn, that a great part of the people in Russia are living to-day, for it is fatally true that no community can live without fear in which one portion of the people seeks to govern the other portion through terror.

The Austrian and Russian border at Barany, the village at which we had now arrived, is not imposing. A wire fence, and a gate such as is sometimes used to guard a railway crossing, are all that separate one country from the other. On one side of this gate I noticed a little sentinel's box, marked in broad stripes, with the Austrian colours, and at the other end of the gate there was a similar little box marked in broad stripes, with the Russian colours. On the Austrian side there was a large building for the use of the customs officials. On the Russian side there was a similar building with the addition of a large compound. In this compound there were about twenty Russian soldiers, standing idly about, with their horses saddled and bridled. The reason for the presence of the soldiers on the Russian side of the border was due to the fact that it is the business of the customs officers not merely to collect the tolls on the commerce that crosses the border at this point, but to prevent any one entering or leaving the country. As Russia imposes an almost prohibitive tax on emigration, most of the Russian emigrants are smuggled across the border.

At the same time it is necessary to closely guard the frontier in order to prevent, as I have said, the importation of books and bombs, the two elements in western civilization of which Russia seems to stand most in fear.

Leaving our droske on the Austrian side of the boundary, Doctor Park and myself applied at the gate between the two countries. A big, good-natured Russian official grinned, but shook his head and indicated that we could not be allowed to cross over. Our driver spoke to him in Polish, but he did not understand, or pretended he did not. Then we found a man who could speak Russian as well as German, and through him we explained that we merely wanted to visit the town and be able to say that we had at least touched Russian soil. On this the man permitted us to go up to the customs office and make our request there. At the customs office we tried to look as harmless as possible, and, with the aid of the interpreter we had brought with us, I explained what we wanted.

At the customs office every one was polite, good-humoured, and apparently quite as much interested in us as we were in them. I was told, however, that I should have to wait until a certain higher and more important personage arrived. In the course of half an hour the more important personage appeared. He looked us over carefully, listened to the explanations of his subordinates, and then, smiling good-naturedly, gave us permission to look about the village. With this gracious permission we started out.

The first thing I noticed was that the smooth, hard road upon which we had travelled from Cracow to the frontier broke off abruptly on the Russian side of the border. The road through the village was full of ruts and mudholes and the mournful and mud-bedraggled teams which were standing near the gate, waiting to cross the border, showed only too plainly the difficulties of travel in the country through which they had passed. Now I had learned in Europe that roads are a pretty good index of the character of the governments that maintain them, so that it was not difficult to see at the outset that the Russians were very poor housekeepers, so to speak, at least as compared with their Austrian neighbours. This was evidently not due to a lack of men and officials to do the work. Counting the civil officials and the soldiers, I suppose there must have been somewhere between twenty and thirty persons, and perhaps more, stationed at this little border village, to collect the toll on the petty traffic that crossed at this point. They were, however, but part of the vast army of officials and soldiers which the Russian Empire maintains along its western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to keep the watch between the east and the west; to halt, inspect, and tax, not merely the ordinary traffic, but the interchange of sentiments and ideas.