building.[1] The streets of the city are not paved and are very imperfectly lighted, but at the time of our visit they seemed to be reasonably clean and well cared for, and the town, as a whole, impressed me much more favorably than many towns of its class in European Russia.
The province of which Tomsk is the capital has an area of 330,000 square miles, and is therefore about seven times as large as the State of Pennsylvania. It contains 8 towns, each of which has on an average 14,000 inhabitants, and 2719 villages, each of which has on an average 366 inhabitants, so that its total population is about 1,100,000. Of this number 90,000 are aborigines, and 30,000 communal exiles, or common criminals banished from European Russia. The southern part of the province is very fertile, is well timbered and watered, and has a fairly good climate. The 3,600,000 acres of land which it has under cultivation yield annually about 30,000,000 bushels of grain and 4,500,000 bushels of potatoes, with smaller quantities of hemp, flax, and tobacco, while the pastures around the villages support about 2,500,000 head of live stock.
From these statistics it will be seen that, in spite of bad government, restricted immigration, and the demoralizing influence of criminal exile, the province of Tomsk is not wholly barren or uncivilized. If it were in the hands of Americans, and if free immigration from European Russia
- ↑ The building of the Tomsk university had been completed at the time of our visit, hut the Government seemed to be unable or unwilling to throw the institution open for the reception of students. It was thought and said, by a certain class of reactionists and obscurantists, that a Siberian university would be a nucleus or rallying-point for "Siberian patriots," that it would foster a spirit of independence and a desire for separation from European Russia, and that, consequently, it ought not to be opened at all. Prince Meshchérski, for example, in his newspaper Grazhdanín, attacked the Tomsk university repeatedly upon this ground. [Grazhdanín, Nos. 275 and 279, St. Petersburg, 1888.] In July, 1888, however, after three years' consideration, the Government decided to open one "faculty," or department, of the new university, and selected, as the most useful and least "dangerous," the department of medicine. Since that time it has been possible for young Siberians to get a university training in medicine, but not in any branch of human knowledge that has a tendency to "excite the mind," such as history, political economy, or law.
