I do not affirm that all the members of the Russian aristocracy speak so contemptuously of their religion and their priests: but here, certainly, are two remarks that no Catholic in our country even, without faith and without any apparent respect whatever for religion or authority, would have dared to make.
There is not in Siberia as in European Russia so great a distance between the people and the upper classes. The peasantry, one day, will not fail to notice the manner in which their creed, to which they have always bent the knee in veneration, is treated by their superiors, and will not be slow in claiming the alluring liberty they have discovered in those who should serve as models for their conduct.
It may be objected again, that this patient and submissive character of the Russian people, and the remoteness of the Eastern Siberians from any civilized nation that might set them an example and encourage them, would retard this emancipation.
The Russians, it is true, are so habituated to a state of patient endurance, in which they live; their resignation is so manifested in their conduct, in their forms of politeness bordering on servility, in their music, and even in their amusements, that it seems impossible there should be a great leader forthcoming from among them capable of changing their destiny. Their neighbours, the Chinese, live under a form of Government, perhaps, still less desirable, and, consequently, these two nations seem incapable of ever escaping from the slavery under which they now live.
JOURNEY OVER LAKE BAIKAL.
But the Chinese, it must be admitted, are far from accepting their subjection with as much resignation as their neighbours of the North. Hitherto accustomed to regard the frontiers of their empire as the limits of the world, and ignorant of the means by which liberty is acquired, it is not surprising that they should have submitted to an authority imposed on them from the first by irresistible force. But to change their views completely, they require only to know us, and then this enlightenment will gradually spread among them. They are not indeed very partial to us, but we astonish them, and they study us. They will soon appreciate the difference of condition between the European nations and the people of the Celestial Empire: they will come among us to educate themselves still more; and since the Chinese are naturally intelligent and logical, doing nothing superficially, they will adopt among themselves such of our institutions as appear to them sound, and adapted to secure the prosperity and happiness of a nation.
In this event the example would probably be followed in rich, but unhappy Siberia.
The three men I have mentioned, taking their meal at Verchni-Oudinsk, and who seemed so convinced of the brilliant future of Eastern Siberia, were not long in entering into conversation with us. Pablo availed himself of the opportunity for expatiating on the terrors he had experienced on Lake Baikal. He described them with much emphasis, not forgetting the most trifling incident, and embellished his narrative with a recital of certain feats of personal prowess that had inevitably escaped my observation. I should certainly have cut short so bombastic and prolonged an entertainment, if I had not seen this man take from my store of provisions a bottle of brandy which I had kept for a different object, deliberately fill his glass and then his companions’, and calmly continue his diversion, sipping all the time as if he were taking his kirsch or anisette.
I wondered at this habit of swallowing thus such strong spirit. It was probably the cold of Siberia that induced the habit, for he was not addicted to it at Constantinople. This droll fellow, in gratifying this singular taste, revealed a superstition still more odd. He took a pinch of earth from a kind of snuff-box he kept constantly in his pocket, and throwing it into his brandy, gulped it, as if it had been deliciously sweetened with so much sugar.