there is always the comfort that a bureaucratic Government has created the machinery on paper for providing and carrying them out should the public ever need them. Indeed, according to the statistical publications, there is no lack of committees in charge of public works and charities of all kinds. There is, for instance, an Urban Sanitary Committee with a long list of titled officials, whose activities apparently exist on paper only, a Hospital Committee, a Highways Committee, and a Committee for regulating the construction of houses—in fact, a sort of Town Planning Committee. But for the present it seems that the Siberian Urban public are quite happy without these European conveniences; the householder, providing for his own comforts and interests, gets along very well in a primitive state and is as contented as if he were living in the wilds. In justice, however, it should be noted that the hospitals in Krasnoyarsk, of which there were three, are well organized. In fact nearly every town in the government has one or more, maintained at public expense. According to statistical information, in the Yenisei Government, with a population of just under one million, over £20,000 a year is spent on hospitals, surgeries, rural doctors and public dispensaries.
One does not expect to find in a Central Siberian town many signs of Western culture, or of any development of public institutes for the educational or scientific training of the minds of the people. But although they certainly do not obtrude themselves before one's eyes, nevertheless, like the public works committees, they exist on paper, and to a limited extent in practice. In Krasnoyarsk, for instance,
