French Gymnase, is found only in towns and cities. As with the rest of government schools, the curriculum is arranged by the educational authorities in St. Petersburg. Here, in the gymnasium, the boy studies history, literature, higher mathematics, and elementary sciences, though the last is taught from books alone, there being no practical demonstrations and no equipment for experiments. English, German, and French are optional, but Latin and Greek are compulsory. In 1880 Count Alexis Tolstoi, Minister of Education, became obsessed with the idea that in copious doses of the dead languages would lie the dissipation of the Russian Empire's social unrest, so he dealt out Latin and Greek with a liberal hand, and the rising generation, even in frontier Siberia, still has to stagger along under his legacy.

In the big cities there are, in addition, the Kommerscheskaja, or privately-conducted trade schools, whose curricula are much easier than those of the gymnasia. They are largely filled with the children of well-to-do Jews. In Siberia the school roll of the smaller towns permits five per cent to be Jewish; in the cities two. There are, beside, in the larger cities, private finishing schools for girls, which have the same exclusive atmosphere of our upper class boarding schools. And to the list should be added the normal institutes for teachers, and the seminaries for priests which are found in all the cities.

When a Siberian lad has arrived at the university stage, he faces a problem. According to governmental requirements, all members of the professions must have taken a course at a university. There is no such thing as reading law in the office of the Merovi Soudi, or local justice of the peace, or studying materia medica at a country hospital. The boy must go to Tomsk to the university. This spells expense and stinting on the part of parents and boys alike, for the average student at the university and the institute is very poor. He works in summer, and even while he is attending classes, he earns his way tutoring in town.

All Siberian schools are run on a government schedule. Classes begin at nine, and continue until half-past eleven, with ten minute intervals every hour, and forty minutes for a shoe-box luncheon. Studies are resumed at half-past twelve, and continue with intervals until three. This means that the scholar gets home at about four o'clock, having had nothing since eight but a sandwich or a cake. Teachers and professors have tried to rectify the system, since they find that their scholars are dull and fatigued in the afternoon sessions, but they have not succeeded.

There is no co-education in Siberia. Recently, however, a petition has been presented to St. Petersburg, begging the admittance of women to the University of Tomsk. In all government-supported schools the scholars are required to wear uniforms. The boys wear a blue suit with a dark-blue overcoat, and a peaked military cap, and the girls a brown frock, a black pinafore, and a black hat. On festivals and at school exercises, a white apron is worn.

It might be noted in passing that in most of the cities the schools are so crowded as to necessitate classes running on half time. More schools and more teachers are needed everywhere, and the municipalities, awakened to the situation, are allotting generous amounts of their budgets to that purpose. Irkutsk sets apart ten per cent of her total revenues for education, a record in Siberia. At the present writing, there are four thousand eight hundred and forty-six schools in Siberia, serving two hundred and forty thousand seven hundred and eighty-four pupils.

As the army and youth in Russia are almost synonymous terms, the problem of education of officers presents not alone a problem, but works itself out in a way that defeats its own ends, as one can readily notice if he drops into a café and sees the disinterested officers, or reads the records of the late war with Japan. The pay of officers is not very high, even in frontier Siberia, and the government has to make special inducements for boys to enter the ranks. The son or sons of officers of the rank of captain or over are taken at the age of ten, given board, lodging, and instruction free. Having passed through their elementary examinations, they go to a more advanced school, of which there is one at Tomsk, at Omsk, Irkutsk, and Vladivostok, and take a course equivalent to that at West Point or Woolwich. This finished, a youth receives a commission and a grant for uniforms. All that is required of him for this free keep and education is to serve six years. So he serves his time, and then, tiring of the work, would gladly retire to some other profession, but being a poor man's son, and knowing no other business but soldiering, he simply stays in the ranks, year after year, losing interest in the work as the days pass. He regards the army as an unpleasant duty that must be performed, simply because it supports him. A pension awaits him after several years; in the meantime he prays that there will be no war, so that he may spend his days in the vodka tractir. The lack of interest of the officers in the Russo-Japanese War can be traced directly to this system of their education.

One afternoon, Dmitri Petrovitch and I wandered into the

park, in the shadow of the cathedral, and sat on a bench to chat. I had been in Tomsk a fortnight, and had seen most of the city. I had visited the club and the churches and the markets, had seen the grave of the "Hermit Tsar," whom the Tomskians and almost everyone in Siberia claim to have been Alexander I. I had visited. the schools and the university, the institute, and a military school. I had talked with many professors and students, but there were still several questions unanswered.

"By the way," I said, "where do you fellows have your athletic field?"

"There isn't any," Dmitri replied as though it were nothing exceptional.

"But what do you do when you play your games?"

"There aren't any games."

"Well what do you do to work off your surplus energy?"

Dmitri laughed. "I suppose some would say that we studied economics and political economy, but there are other things that we do. Come on, I'll show you."

We strolled across the square, and, passing down a side street, came to a gap in the line of houses, where stood the charred shell of what was once a building of some size.

That was the theatre," said Dmitri Petrovitch. "On the 20th of November, 1905, when the strike of the railroad was at its height, and when the students were especially excited over some action of the governor-general, they gathered a gang of roughs and set fire to that building, and stoned those who attempted to escape. A couple of score were killed. Most of the students were caught. They were either sentenced to death, or, what is worse, were sent for long terms of hard labor to the northern prison settlements. I suppose you might call that working off surplus energy."

Dmitri Petrovitch, as I saw him in his lodgings and at the university, was a perfect example of a theory I had been evolving during my stay in Tomsk, of the causes of student riots in Russian universities.

Like many other nationalities tinged with Oriental blood, the Russian holds the male issue in special reverence. At home no discipline is laid on the boy. His sisters are punished, but never he. It breaks a boy's spirit to use the rod, his mother will tell you. When he goes to the elementary schools, he carries this same spoiledchild spirit with him. There is no discipline. Corporal punishment has been forbidden for the past fifty years. The master, being

dependent on his success with the boys for his salary, finds it wiser to permit a boy the free hand, just so long as he passes his examinations. Thus on through the school list, until the boy reaches the university. Here matters take a different course. The professors

have little or no relations with their scholars. There are none of those informal seminars known to American and British students, whereby one is able to know his proctor. The reason for the separation is obvious. In seminars a professor is chatty, and often expresses personal views. His views on sociological and economic questions may be revolutionary. Already professors have tumbled into this pitfall, with the result that they and their scholars have been exiled to the north. So the wise professor simply reads his lectures, and lets the student get along without counsel and advice, as best he can. The boy, having had a free hand at home and at school, being away from his parents, being filled with adolescent enthusiasm which always runs to revolutions, is bound to get into trouble. He has no games, for any assembling of students save in class-rooms is forbidden by the government.1 So the student flares out now and then into riots, into silly revolutionary strikes. The girls follow the men willy nilly, and the police soon have them lodged in jail with serious political charges preferred.

This is the state of affairs at the University of Tomsk, and this is the underlying cause of all the trouble that has been cropping up there, and at other Russian universities, for the past fifteen years. The utter lack of discipline, the lack of intimacy and friendship between professor and pupil, the lack of wholesome sports, the lack of wise counsel. The government must shoulder part of the blame. Her rulings for students defeat their own ends. This was what Dmitri Petrovitch meant when he said that among the plans of the Russian government for Siberia there was, beside emigration and education, stern subjugation. That was also why, when he and his fellow-students celebrated passing their examinations in the café of the "Rossia," not more than two sat at a table, fearing that a third would cause them to be suspected as arch plotters against the realm! Yet they were singing, despite their subjugation, the song of youth and of youthful lands

Gaudeamus Igitur
Juvenes dum sumus.

'Three students constitute a political meeting, according to the Russian police, and when students are rioting, the police are allowed to fire upon groups of three

or more.

VENICE.

BY EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS.

enter Venice, as in these days we probably do, by rail, is to end a long journey, often hot and crowded, always noisy and fatiguing; to pass through the bustle and uproar of a great railway terminus and then, all in a moment, to find oneself lying in the absolute peace and luxury of a gondola, and with brief delay to glide off into the silence of the water. Well, as we come to know and love Venice, perhaps the surprise and joy of that first impression, the beauty of that first coup d'œil, whether by daylight or moonlight, can never be surpassed.

The best way to realize the city as a whole, is to spend a day or two in a gondola wandering about the lagoons and waterways. We cannot think of Venice without picturing the wide lagoon in which she lies, marshland between the city and the mainland, lake where it lies in calm reaches close round the buildings, and almost sea on the outer part, where the action of the tides as they flow in from the porti are most strongly felt. The daily ebb and flow sweeps through every smallest canal, covering or laying bare the mud banks, making everything sweet and clean, and carrying all refuse to the sea. In a storm, when the west wind blows strongly, you may stand on the quays and listen to the waves booming on that narrow rampart of sea, sand and mud, the Lido, which keeps back the force of the Adriatic, just as it has kept all hostile forces at bay in the past. It sounds as if a very little would bring the ocean in overwhelming fury upon the city, and you realize the necessity for the sea walls or murazzi, which strengthen the frail barrier at its weakest points. The lagoon is full of channels deep enough to float a ship at high tide and a boat at low tide. These are kept open by dredging, and are defined by those groups of palli or posts, which are such a characteristic feature of the lagoon. In the days of Charlemagne, the force which sailed under Pepin against the town was sent to its doom by an old woman of Malamocco, where one of the ports opens. She pointed out the easy way, and the Frankish ships set sail without misgiving across the broad calm sheet of water, on the other side of which lay the goal of their