One morning we passed through a great square in Moscow containing nothing but men—wild-eyed, long-haired, long-bearded men; men in rags, most of them, and all of them compelled to come there and wait to be hired to work. To that square must all working men go who seek work. The city feeds them while they wait, a single small piece of black bread each day. Some never leave that square, but wait there their lifetime through. They gazed upon our handsome landau with hungry and wolfish eyes. How glad would they have been to tear us into pieces and divide what little spoil they might obtain! I never before beheld so frightful, unkempt a company of hopeless, hapless, hungry human slaves as these Russian workingmen who waited for a job.
A MOSCOW TRAM CAR.
&
THE OUT-OF-WORKS.
XXI.
The First Snows—Moscow to Warsaw—Fat Farm Lands and Frightful Poverty of the Mujiks Who Own them and Till them—I Recover My Passport.
Hotel Savoy, Friedichs Strasse,
Berlin, Germany, September 23, 1902.
“Hoch der Kaiser, Hoch der Kaiser! Gott sei Dank! Ich bin in Deutschland angekommen!” have my brain and blood and bones been crying out all the last fifty miles, since we safely crossed the Russian border. Until the moment when the last Russian official waked me up, held a light in my face, and, staring at me, compared my visage with what the passport said it ought to be, and handed me back that document to be mine forever, to be framed and hung up in my Kanawha home, and preserved for my children and children’s children as evidence that I came safe out of Russia; not till that midnight hour did I realize that I belonged to the common Teutonic brotherhood of men, and that Puritan-descended American though I were, I and my German neighbor were yet really kin! But at that moment when we crossed the German boundary, I knew it and felt it in every fibre and tingling nerve. I was a Teuton, I was a German, I was come again among my blood kindred. “Hoch der Kaiser,” “Selig sei Deutschland!” I had come out of mediaevalism, from the shadows of barbarism, I was emerged into the light of the twentieth century’s sun!
We left Moscow late Sunday afternoon, in a blinding snow storm, the first of the year.