Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1884-12-05
CORN PORT.
A Commercial Mart On the Black Sea an
Its Characteristic Features.

Its characteristic Features.
There are ono towns, as there are
some faces, upon which the lapse of
years seems to leave no trace, and the
corn port of Russia is certainly one of
them. Its bo~mbardment by the COM
bined fleets of France and England in
1854 might almost be considered a
blessing in disguise, as tending to
break, even if only for ; time, its dead
ly uniformity. But even setting it on
fire did it no permanent good. The
streets are just as straight, the butter
colored'houses just as yellow, the sur
roundings just as outrageously modern
as when | was last here in 1873. One
change, indeed, is apparent. viz: That
the names of the principal streets,
formerly written in Russian and Italian,
now appear in Russian alone. But in
all other points Odessa is Odessa still.
The statues "after the antique" are SO
long after it that it has forgotten all
about them. The gaunt, scraggy
church-towers look like overgroWn
cotfee-pots, and all the larger buildings
are so exactly alike that l am in hourly
expectation of seeing a newly-arrived
tourist swagger into the Town Hall OF
the Public Library instead of his hotel,
shouting to the astounded custodian to
'trot out the bill of fare"
But this universal unprogressiveness
is merely the natural and inevitable re-
suit OF the peculiar temperament which
characterizes the Slavonian race
P%aradoXical as the assertion may ap-
pear. there is not enough discomfort in
Russia. There is, indeed, misery
enough, and far too much; but, instead
of being thereby goaded into advanc-
ing, the sole idea of the suffering
masses is to endure doggedly until the
evil day is past, and then to Jog on in
the old ruts after the old fashion. The
Finn still inhabits the same log hut,
wears the same shoes of twisted bark,
feeds upon the same dried bread and
fish mixed with sawdust, which served
his forefathers in the days OF F'eter the
Great. The Russian peasant, in an age
OF railways and telegraphs, is still the
same careless, .h%ospitable. thievish,
drunken, good-humored savage that he
was two centuries ago. The Tartars of
the Crimea, burrowing like rabbits
amid the ruins of Chersonesus or in the
caverns of the Inkerman valley, will
tell you, as they told Mr.. Kinglake in
October, 1854, that they were content
because their race has lived happily I'M
der the czars for three generations. 1t
is not from such material as this that
great nationsar e wrought. The sheep
skin-frocked philosopher of the steppes,
a conservative by nature and a ~fatalist
by creed, accepts without a murmur
the coarse fare and log-built hovel
which served his ancestors in the mid
die ages, content to remain as his
father was before him, and as his son
will be after him. 10 offer civilization
to such a race is like reading poetry to
an oyster.
But however morally backward she
may be, the great empire has visibly
advanced in a material sense since the
day when 1 saw all Moscow mourning
for ''the good czarina' four years ago.
If railways are indeed, as the we'll
known saying declares, the 'strue civil
izers of mankind she has constructed
enough of them lately. Apart from
the famous military railroad from the
eastern shore of the Caspian eastward
across the Khiya desert-whioh has inst