churia and Chosen, perhaps we could yet work out our destiny in peace. That precisely was the offer Japan made to Russia. But unfortunately, Japan was a mere joke in the eyes of Admiral Alexieff and other Russian architects of her Far-Eastern Empire who were upon the ground and whose counsel had greater weight at the Court of the Tsar than any other. The thing drifted on steadily toward the abyss until the night of February 8th, 1904, when our friend Admiral Alexieff and the Far Eastern fleet of Russia, riding at anchor in the roadstead of Port Arthur, woke up with a start.

PASSING OF RUSSIA FROM SOUTH MANCHURIA

At Portsmouth in the summer of 1905 the fuss came to an end. History sometimes turns into a satirist. It brought M. de Witte, author of the Chinese Eastern Railway system and father of the dream of the greater Russia in the Far East, to the graveyard of his own dream-child. Port Arthur and Dalny passed definitely out of the Russian rainbow, and with them 4371⁄2 miles of South Manchuria railway up to Changchun, with all the mining and other privileges and concessions.

So died the grandiose fantasy of the Far-Eastern Empire of the Tsar. But not the real work of Russians, there in Manchuria.

Quite the contrary. It is more alive to-day than ever before. That city which the Russians planted hard by a solitary Chinese distillery in the heart of the valley of the Sungari and which stands as the peroration of Russian efforts in North Manchuria, is more than twice as big to-day as it was on the day when the Portsmouth Treaty was signed. When I visited it last year, the City of Harbin claimed a population of 400,000. The Harbin police statistics of November, 1922, gave it more than 380,000.

It is far and away the most important city in North Manchuria it is its chief distributing point. All the industrial activities of the vast Amur Province of Manchuria center there. It is the only city in the whole of Asia which has nearly as many white population as natives in it.

CITY OF HARBIN

Harbin was founded May 28th, 1898, officially. It is less than 27 years young. It is the one outstanding monument to the constructive activities of Russians in Manchuria. The old Harbin was a mere village, practically nothing at all, when the Russians began to build from it in the general direction of the Sungari River. According to the police figures of Harbin for November, 1922, there were 155,402 Russians in the city; and its total Chinese population numbered 183,696. There were less than 4,000 Japanese. There were more than 36,000 of other races. In 1918 there were 60,200 Russians there against 94,000 Chinese. Therefore in four years the Russians increased two and a half times, while the Chinese were doubling their number. This, I believe, is a record unparalleled in the history of European population in an Asian city. This was not altogether due to commercial or economic reasons: it was largely due to the coming of the Bolshevik Régime into European Russia, toward the close of the Great War. When the old Tsarist Régime went under the Red flood, thousands of Russians fled from Europe. To the refugees the oncedreaded ice-locked prison for murderers and traitors did not look so bad. The young flourishing town in Northern Manchuria, which was being sung as the New Moscow of the Far East, took on the rosy tints of a haven of refuge. They therefore made a rush for it, especially while the influence of the White Russians was dominant.

What makes the story of Harbin so eloquent is not that it was the one grand boom town in the far, frozen north, making the wildest of the wild Western boom towns of America look colorless by comparison. The story of Harbin is the story of what Russia did for the Chinese: that is its true and unexpected meaning. Russians never cared a fig for the Chinese. The economic and commercial benefits for the natives and for hundreds of thousands of coolies who worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway, were about the last thing the architects of the Far-Eastern Empire of the Tsar would bother about. Yet, after less than thirty years, practically the only thing left to show for the expenditure of something close to half a billion of Russian rubles in the stupendous Manchurian adventure is the prosperous condition of the Chinese colonists and merchants who had come crowding up to North Manchuria to supply the labor needs as well as the life needs of Russian intruders. That precisely was what General Kropatkin had in mind when he cited certain statistical figures and declared that something like 300,000,000 rubles which had been taken out of the pockets of Russian peasants had fallen into the hands of Chinese coolies in the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The railway line had given Russians very little except deficits and troubles for years. The garrison alone cost Russia ten-million rubles and two-million more for civil administration of the railway zone. But with the Chinese there was a different tale. It paid them from the start. We have already seen how the Manchu Government at Peking reaped nothing but disaster for all its efforts to open up the virgin steppes of North Manchuria. The Chinese coolies who had responded to the call of Russian rubles succeeded where the Manchu Bannermen with government subsidies utterly failed. It is historically accurate to say that nothing short of the golden