The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-12-06
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS

I find that I am continually thinking of unhappy Russia. for if there ever was | a nation betrayed and humiliated, it was l the land of the late Czar, and it's be- trayer was Germany.
 1 Germany has been the Nemesis of Rus 1 sia. For many years the German schol- ars made it their business to lay stress on 'Slav barbarism" wherever possible, l to obscure the brighter pages of Slav 1 history and bring out the darker ones and in fact, to emphasize everything that could be looked upon as proof of savagery or arrested development ;, The reason for the cultural ostracism' of Russia has been pointed out as both racial and geographical. Keep this In mind in thinking of the situation. Be- tween western Europe and the Slavs lies imperial Germany, who has acted not only i as a barrier but also as a distorting l glass through which the western and eastern races of Europe were compelled to look at each other.
 
 1 Germany never ceased to cry aloud l agalnst the danger of the Slav peril. It gave her a chance to build up her great war machine and hoodwnk the other western powers by pretending that she was to be the bulwarlk against the raid of the great white bear from the north and the west The mobiliza- tion of the Russian army was her ex- cuse for plunging Europe into war. l But if ever a nation is reaping what she sowed that nation is Germany, who financed Lenine for the purpose of bring ing about q revolution in Russia under the idea that bolshevism would have no l flare back in the Kaisers land because his army was all-powerful and then his people too well disciplined to revolt-but today Germany faces all kinds of inter- na! disorders.
 We think frequently of Russia as land of cold, great plains, or forbidding i mountains, with ice-locked ports. Si- loria is another Canada. The Russian holds that his dear little mother Rus sa'' is the most beautiful land Of all the earth. It is vast country, reaching from the snows of the far north to lands where the orange trees bloom all the 1 year round.
 A Russian well says that the mountain tsstnesses and prccipiees of the Urals, the green slopes of the Caucasus. the Si- berian wastes, the gray shores of the Battle and the sunny cirnes of the Eux- inc, the Nolga and the Don and even the sacred steppes-,to him they are all beau- tiful, to him they reflect the image of his soul and his feelings.
 Roughly speaking, there are more than 175. .0ooO O00 Slavs in the world It's well known fact that the Russian land scape is as peculiar as is the Russian people You can't read any of the Rus sian writers without being made to fee 1 that they have been affected by the scenery and dominated by their environ ment There is probably not another country in the world where the climatic and geographical conditions have so deeply influenced the innermost character of the people,
 Now, Of course, in a trip through Rus sia I could not detect it myself but il is claimed by one who was born In the country that even the external fea- lures of the people are molded by their environment. He claims that where the landscape is beautiful and the cli- mate sunny, the handsome type prevails; | whereas the cold inhospitable tracts produce the characteristic wide faced. flat-nosed type of men and women.
 Sir John Foster Frazer says, "Petro- grad is the head of Russia, and Moscow is the heart Of it. but the soul of Rus s.a spreadeth throughout the land and is not to be measured" Nowhere in all the world. is there a greater love of the land. That is why one of the Russian poets has said that the soil has a soul like the soul of her children, for whom she cares and loves and breathes. This soul appears everywhere the same; 1t exhales the same perfume from the dry grass Of the steppes. as from the Crimean