The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1886-06-29
A RUSSIAN LoDGING.HoUSE.'
The Pleasures Life Offers to DweIlers I'm
st. Petersburg Apartments.

The Pleasures Life Offers to DweIIers I'm
st. Petersburg Apartments.
Let us try to realize for moment
what life in st. Petersburg is, not to the
easy-minded traveller, whose home is far
away and who may leave Russia at any
moment, but to the native resident,
whose family ties and generalinterests-
to say nothing of patriotism-bind him
to the country even more firmly than he
may chance to be attached to it by the
arbitrariness of the police. The lodg-
ing-house, under circumstances like
these, wears an aspect strikingly sug-
-gestive of the Jail. Exigencies of state
turn the communal dwelling-place and
its picturesque survivals into an aggrega-
ton of cells, watched over by house
porter in the pay of the police. This
functionary is very Heimdal in sharp
ness of senses; he hears the faintest
sounds, and sees without any light
whatever; while his omnipresence when
not wanted is far more complete than
any magic carpet of Arabian tale could
make it. This parsonage it is who
mounts guard at the porte-cochere to
watch entries and exits; it is he who
sees that all new dodgers are promptly
numbered and pigeon-holed at police
headquarters; he who keeps a record OF
the personal habits, companions and
resorts of every man, woman and child
under his charge; he, too, who reports
regularly to the authorities any 'tsus-
NH nh,1 q
under his notice. If a christening, a
wedding or funeral is TO bring togeth-
er few friends, it is the house porter
who facilitates the intrusion of police
spies, ready to snatch at any scrap OF
colloquial ''sedition" capable of CONVEX.
sion into roubles or advancement. If g
students Literary evening" or social
gathering is TO be swelled into an assem-
bly, of conspirators seeking to under
mine the foundations of law and order
it is again the house-pcrter who, figura
lively speaking, supplies the gendarme'
with their magnifying-glasses. And i
some unfortunate youth is to pay the
penalty of his liberalism by being drag
ged from his bed at midnight to the
fortress of Peter and Paul, nobody il
more eager to lead the way to the sleep
ing suspect than this treacherous janitOl
of many households, nightly consum
mating in the garb of the watchdog
his unholy compact with the wolves.
To 90 in constant fear of the paid de
nunciator; never to talk politics save
with relatives, or intimates incapable o
treachery; to have your local newspaper
turned by the censor into a mere RECORD
of foreign events, and your foreign jour
nal sub-edited for you by policeman
who carefully clips from it or erase
everything of dangerous" tendency
not to know the moment when al
enemy may thrust some seditious publ
cation in your letter-boX, and so time
his disclosure to the police as to have
you surprised with the forbidden matte
in YOUR possession; TO be kept by
silent press in a state of complete igno
rance as to serious events occurring
around you; and to feel in regarC
to your own personal safety
and that of your family anC
friends, an uncertainty truly Oriental
all this is no more that a mere sugges
ton of what life is to thousands of per
sons born to Russian citizenship i'm st
Petersburg. And when to the element
of the general discomfort, to the bittel
emptiness of existence, to the longing
for a life of nobler activities, you add
the pangs of poverty and the sense o
personal wrong, it can not seem strange
that in many of these clearinghouse
sensitive humanity should find its las
and only safeguard against voluntary
extinction in the hopes. the idealism anC
the self-sacrifce of political reli giOn.-
Edmund Noble. IN atlantic.