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Show Poor Russia The London Times publishes extracts from a letter written by Mile. Marie Spiridonovna on the way to Siberia. We copy a few sentences: "I am not alone; I have for fellow travelers other unhappy beings who will 'share my lot. We are suffering together; the same heavy weight is on all our hearts. We gaze for long hours through the barred windows, but hardly ever speak. We have confided our sorrows to each other. We have mingled our tears. Now we are almost silent." Prisoners are now carried by railroad. Formerly For-merly they were transported on rude wagons and on foot. People every day ask when peace will ccme to Russia. Our Lincoln said: "Yet if God wills, until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword; as was said three thousand years ago, so it still is and it must be said: 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " If the crime of African slavery was so great that the homes of a great nation had to be made houses of mourning because 400,000 of the bravest brav-est and best had died before atonement was wrought, what is in store for a land that watched in silence as centuries slowly unwound, while the bravest and best of the land, by thousands, were marched to living deaths in a land of frost and terror? And their only cry was that they demanded de-manded the death of tyranny and that justice and liberty under the law should rule. For centuries the reigning house of Russia has claimed a divine right to rule the Russian people, a double right to rule them politically and to stand as the representative rep-resentative of the Lord in heaven spiritually. The resalt is what it always is when clamps are put upon the souls of men and there is no check upon the tyranny unspeakable, the cruelty unmeasured which come of unlicensed power, in the perpetual perpet-ual struggle to suppress the instincts of free souls and to still the voices of brave men and women who would be free. And the prayers pf these martyrs have been winging their way up from prisons and from the chains of the enslaved. God must have heard them and tire answers 'are coming now. This makes it impossible to estimate esti-mate when or through what means peace will be restored. We doubt very much if the imperial house can outlast the awful storm. Not only are the prayers of individuals who have suffered rising up, but the cries of whole peoples who have been shorn of their nationalities Poland, Finland, Turkistan a dozen nations that have been drawn Into that Russian maelstrom and engulfed. As the earth, when being fitted for the habitation habita-tion of races that then oxisled only in the mind of God, went through convulsion after convulsion; convul-sion; the rending of its crust, the sweep of inconceivable in-conceivable storms, the grinding of glaciers, and the beating of untamed oceans, so violence seems always nature's way when re-forming matter. It is so in Russia. Violence seems to have full sway and no mortal can see the end. But at last, when the matter was wrought into form, the Infinite commanded that the vapors should roll away and there should be light; that the seas should retire within their bounds; that the rivers should start on their ways to the sea; that the tree and flower should spring up to gladden the awful waste and peace should come. .Then the songs of birds were first heard; then the miracle of the sunbeams, the rainbows and the falling rain was performod, and when all was prepared, man was called in God's own image, man and woman, to possess the glorified planet. So when it is asked, "When is peace to come to Russia?" none can answer, but repetition is an order of nature, and we may hope that it will bo when the manhood of Russia is called to take dominion over that distressed country to rulo with justice tempered with mercy. |