IN the Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias, the organ of the University of Havana, we find a very suggestive article on the urgent need for some instruction in the rudiments of agriculture in the public country schools of Cuba. The author, Prof. José Cadenas, not only makes a strong plea for the introduction of this study but gives simple directions, with illustrations, showing how easily it could be managed with no expensive change in the present system. In the first place he points out that it is foolish ever to expect to reform agriculture from the top, or to think that it can be conducted in a more scientific manner until the field laborers are less densely and obstinately ignorant of the real nature of the processes in which they deal.

Trained farmers, graduates of agricultural colleges, expert overseers, university experiment stations are of no avail as long as the actual workers on the soil are wholly unable and unwilling to co-operate in intelligent methods. Special agricultural schools will not fill this gap, because the actual dwellers on the soil will never go to these schools. Whatever instruction they get must be given them in the common schools, which they are forced by law to attend. As to a too-crowded curriculum, Professor Cardenas says frankly that it seems to him of more importance that a child should have some general fundamental ideas about the nature of soils and conditions of vegetable life than about countries which he never will see. The future of Cuba is agricultural, and no efforts should be spared to put her in the way of competing successfully with scientifically trained

rivals.

nature of root growth. Plants growing in glass and water also show the direction, force, and necessities of growth underground. Screens about some pots, and sunshine on others, illustrate the relation of sunlight to plant-life and the disadvantages of shaded places. An elementary knowledge of the influence of light in the green coloring matter, and hence the health of plants, is shown by this method. The study of soil is to be done in the same unpretentious, practical way. The three fundamental elements of soil are to be learned and the various tests for determining their varying proportions in any given sample. Quoting from the article in the Cuban review:

Dried earth crumbled out on a piece of paper shows the children, even without the use of the microscope, the decaying vegetable matter, bits of woods not yet decomposed, and the underlying mineral constituents of all soil: sand, lime and clay. Various simple tests are shown, such as washing the sand clear from the rest, evaporating the water which has dissolved the clay and lime from the sand, and comparing the proportions thus obtained. The test for lime is to put an acid in the test-tube with the earth. This may be vinegar or lemon juice. The bubbles of carbonic gas show the existence of more or less lime. A few general ideas as to the value of the different sorts of soil are also to be taught, as that crops which thrive on a sandy soil will not do well in clay, and vice versa. Differences in manner of growth of plants are thus connected with the nature of soil, as that sand is easy for delicate roots to penetrate, is easily worked and kept light, but does not hold the heat during the night for tender plants as sand, since it retains moisture. does clay. Also that clay needs less water than

man.

Professor Bugge uses the opportunity to point out that the Norsemen not only fought but also traded all around northern Europe from the eighth to the thirteenth century of the present era, and that during those years they stamped themselves indelibly on those parts of the visited countries that bordered on the high seas. At every point along the coasts of England, Ireland, northern France, and Germany where the world's traffic finds passage, or where it did so once, the names of towns and harbors and islands and landmarks of various kinds show traces of Norse origin. A trail of such names, some disguised almost beyond recognition and others remaining nearly in their original form, leads the historian from Schleswig, along the German coast of the Baltic, past the island of Gotland, up the Gulf of Finland, up the imperial Neva, across the immense sheet of Lake Ladoga, up another river to Lake Ilmen and to the ancient city where the Swedish sea king Rurik and his brothers founded the Russian Empire about the year 862.

There the free institutions and the spirit of self-government characteristic of the Scandinavian race were established, and there they prevailed in more or less modified form until the Mongolian wave changed the racial character of the empire. About 1000 A. D. Novgorod had a constitution known as the Pravda Russkaja, and it shows that the Norsemen, or Varingians, were still the ruling class of the district. Special privileges were granted them, and particularly the privilege of affirming their side of a legal suit by

oath alone when the Slavic and Finnish natives had to bring witnesses. Their cases were heard before twelve sworn "witnesses," six of whom were selected by either side to the suit. That institution, known as the

When, about the same time, the Grand Duke Igor sent a delegation to Constantinople for the purpose of negotiating a commercial treaty with the Byzantian Emperor, he chose as delegates twenty-five Norse merchants. And as long as the Varangian elements dominated the city of Novgorod that city sent its ships and its merchants all over the known world.

spirit of enterprise died out, and thereafter the When Slav and Mongolian took power the world came to Novgorod. About 1000 the Russians,-i. e., the Norse merchants at Holmgaardr (their name for Novgorod),-had their own church in the city of Visby on the Baltic island of Gotland. Two hundred years later that church had passed into other hands and the merchants of Visby had their own church at Novgorod. And it was men of Visby and Lübeck principally who made the long and toilsome trips to the shores of Ilmen, traveling in their own ships as far as the entrance of the River Wolkow into Lake Ladoga. There their cargoes were transferred into open flat-bottomed three-day journey to Novgorod. In the city itboats and carried by the Rivermen's Guild the self a separate district was set aside for the strangers, and there was a Varangian Street and a Varangian Quarter, the latter strongly princes was still composed almost wholly of fortified. The Hird, or bodyguard, of the ruling Norsemen.

Professor Bugge quotes the Arabian traveler, Ibn Fachlan, who in the year 922 met and described a party of Russian,—that is, Varangian,-merchants on the shores of the Caspian Sea. They were a wild lot, still preserving many of their heathen customs and superstitions, burning their dead and torturing the prisoners taken in war. They swore by their own weapons exclusively, gruesome oaths that threatened the perjurer with eternal thraldom in the world to come. But they kept their oaths, and they carried along with them rich stores of song and saga, traces of which are still to be found in the folklore of modern Russia.

Together with the gods of war and of fortune, those of fancy and of poetry were also worshipped. The mixture of the Slavic and the eleventh and twelfth centuries produced another North Germanic culture has apparently in the and wholly distinct culture. It was the latter

which gave to Novgorod its liberty and its selfgovernment; which made of this city a spot by itself in all Russian history, and which makes us believe that Russia but for the centuries of ret

rogression caused by the Mongolian invasion would have developed social institutions like those of western Europe before the end of the Middle Ages.

THE 'HE woman's demand for suffrage and social equality is a familiar fact of western civilization, but up to the immediate past the movement has been foreign to the Russian woman. Indeed, as a writer in the Tag (Berlin) observes, the male sex in Russia has enjoyed no social or legal preference over the female, "because both were deprived of legal and social rights." Therefore, the effort to enlighten the people has been a common effort, and Russian men and women have fought shoulder to shoulder, have been common martyrs, have shed their blood together, and have occupied the same or neighboring cells in the Russian bastiles." But this situation has now changed.

The first Duma elections,—participated in only by men,-drew a sharp line between the two sexes, and the government's constitutional plan, -which limits its consideration to the male sex, and gives the woman no individual political rights. has increased the breach. Further, the attitude of a portion of the male population in raising their suddenly acquired rights to a prerogative which they refuse to women has galvanized the dormant woman's movement, and has fixed in sharp contrast the formerly united male and female interests.

At present there are two women's organizations, both of which are energetically working in their chosen field; these organizations bear the titles: "League for Woman's Suffrage," and the " Female Progress Party." During the session of the first Duma these two organizations bombarded the deputies and the people with tracts and addresses, and it was the direct result of their work that a majority of the Duma finally declared for woman's suffrage and incorporated it in the constitutional project." It would be natural to suppose that the movement would be limited to certain narrowly defined spheres, that the cultured woman. of the middle classes, the educated working woman, and the occasional aristocrat would be the mouthpieces of the propaganda, and give expression to what is a mere intuition with the majority of Russian women. But the contrary is true. The cultured classes take "an active part in the movement, but the roots of the suffrage idea

disclosing a power of judgment and a political maturity which are amazing in view of the low level of the Russian peasant in general."

The feeling among the Russian women is genuine; they foresee their future legal disenfranchisement and fear disastrous results. This fact is clearly shown by a characteristic manifesto which the writer in the Tag cites, and which was sent the deputies from the Tver department by the women of their district. The petition recites in part:

We have

We, peasant women of the Tver department, write to the imperial Duma, to the deputies who have been chosen from our district. For, men of the Duma, we are discontented with our lot; our husbands and sons are willing for us to amuse them, but when it comes to the country and the new laws which are being discussed they will have nothing to say to us. Up to the present, although we have been beaten many times by our men-folk, still we have decided many important things together. But now they tell us that we are no companions for them, that they go to the Duma and rule the state, or if not they themselves, at least their deputies. If the law had made us equal with the men we would have nothing to say, but now women and maids must stand aside, outcasts, able to decide nothing for themselves. But gentlemen, deputies of the Duma, this law is unjust,-it separates peasant man from peasant woman, even makes them enemies. It is an insult to us women. borne misery in common with our husbands, but now, when the time has come for us to live together under the law, we are no longer needed. But, gentlemen, deputies of the Duma from the Tver department, in the name of God have sympathy with us. We are told that you can change the law. Then say to the Duma that all questions must be decided as God commands, and that every one must be admitted to the Duma, Otherwise rich and poor, man and woman. there will be no truth on earth or peace in families. In former times we had the same authority as our husbands, but now our husbands are to make laws for us and we are to be treated as babes and children. . . . We have not signed our names or the names of our towns because we fear our husbands and the government. But there are many young women and old women among us, and a thirteen-year-old girl writes this letter.

The fact cannot be overlooked that "from the Russian wilderness comes a full-grown woman's suffrage movement, faithfully re

GREGORY GERSHUNI.

(The Jewish Russian revolutionist, now in this country, who escaped from a Siberian prison in a cask of sauerkraut.)

IT

T is a noteworthy list, that of the Russian revolutionists who, during the past year, have visited this country to arouse interest in the Russian people's fight for political freedom. It includes Maxim Gorki, Gregory Maxim, Nicholas Tchaikovski, and now the famous peasant leader Alexis Alyadin and the terrible Gregory Gershuni.

A most thrilling, dramatic story is that of the escape of the hunted Jew Gershuni, who got out of a Manchurian prison in a barrel of sauerkraut and fled across the desolate plains, slipping through Japan and across the Pacific to San Francisco. From the Pacific Coast to New York he has been making speeches and arousing sympathy for his oppressed countrymen. In a graphically told story, in the March number of Charities and the Commons, Paul U. Kellogg tells the story of Gershuni's escape. The career of this Jew revolutionist and his escape from the vengeance of the authorities is so typical that the outlines of it cannot fail to be instructive.

Gershuni is called the inventor of the revolution," a far-seeing tactician, a thinker

ahead of his enemies to confound their scheming and force their hand in unexpected quarters.' Plehve called him the backbone of the revolution when, in 1904, he sentenced the little Jew to death. Gershuni escaped execution, however, and his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. He was first sent to Moscow and then, in the summer of 1906, with a number of others, to Akatui, on the Mongolian frontier, in Manchuria, a month by train and ten days afoot. Of his own career Gershuni says: 'It is like the career of many another revolutionist. You begin with a book and you wind up with a revolver."

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Here is Mr. Kellogg's description of Gershuni's escape from Akatui, the data being gleaned from conversation with the revolutionist himself:

The prison was fast, he tells you with his quick gestures, so fast that the prisoners were left by themselves in the strong room where they were kept at work on provisions for the garrison. Opposite were the houses where the officials lived and the storehouse to which the prisoners carried the provisions under guard. Everything that passed was examined by the officials, but a chance lay in the barrels of sauerkraut filled from cabbages cut up in the prison When the day of the trial came, Gershuni doubled up into a cask, and his fellows fastened in above him a false head, or partition, fashioned from leather found in the workroom. It was crude, but it kept up most of the cabbage and trickle that they filled in to the bar

room.