THE LAND OF THE FUTURE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 227, 23 March 1912, Page 7

THE LAND OF THE FUTURE.

RUSSIA'S GREAT SCHEME OF SIBERIAN. EXPANSION. Russia's dramatic coup in the Far East, by whiph she has .deprived the Chinese Empire of the vast province of Outer Mongolia, will not only add a million, square miles o£ territory and some 3,000,000 people to the Russian of influence, but also means another step, forward in the great sehemes o£ Siberian expansion which have occupied the Government unceasingly sine? the war with 1 Japan. Sibera, Russia's vast hinterland., stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, has long been recognised as a land of immense potentialities. Once it was the land of the exile. Now it is the land of the emigrant, where the Russian peasant under his own flag may find a new home and new opportunities. The policy of peopling Sibera received a set-back from the war, but immediately peace was declared the Government again turned its attention eastward, and since then the tide of emigration to the east has been constantly increasing in volume.

To-day the population of the 4,817,687 square miles comprising Sibera is 8,220,100, or under two people to the square mile. When it is pointed out that in European Russia the population averages 62 persons to the square mile it will be understood what vast solitudes there remain to be filled. RICHES OF SIBERA. In the popular imagination, especially the imagination fed by melodrama and sensational fiction, Sibera is a desert waste, icebound and snow-covered, with salt mines dotted here and there, in which, victims of Russian tyranny grind out there lives in daily misery. As- a matter of fact, it is a country with wide stretches of rich black eartth, waiting only for the farmer to become fruitful, with vast hidden stores of coal, iron, silver, and even gold, and with magnificent forests, rivalling in their lumber possibilities the great wooden harvests of the American Continent.

Whether it is to he soon or late, it is a country destined to play a large part in the production of the world's food supply, and even to-day, when its development had but begun, it is producing 170,000,000 poods—a pood equalling 361bs — of cereals a year, while great flocks of sheep are being reared on its great prairies and steppes. Despite the evidence on all hands, ■ however, of the possibilities of the country, comparatively little has been done Its cultivation area is but a patch on the vast tracts of virgin soil, its immense coal deposits have only been scratched, while its timber—in the Amur and maritime provinces alone there are 509,000,000 acres of forest land—is still uncut.

Many schemes for the creation of new industries and the exploitation of the vast mineral and agricultural wealth of the country have been put forward, but the difficulties in the way have militated against success. The greatest want of Sibera is railways, and now that the Government is realising this the new era for the country is beginning to'open tip. A MATTER OF MILLIONS. The first great achievement in this direction was the construction of the great Siberian railway, in which over £140,000,000 was sunk before it was completed. It stretches from Moscow to Vladivostok, a distance of 5527 miles, every inch, except the last strip across Manchjiria, being in Russian territory. This great achievement was but the foundation, as it were, of thg Russian Government's plans for the development of its great eastern possession. Other immense railway schemes have since been projected, and in some cases decided on, involving the expenditure of further vast sums of money. They may be summarised as follows:-^-

Doubling and improving the present, £22,000,000; opening up Southern Sibera by a line running from Orsk through Orenburg to Semipalatinsk and Barnaul, to the railway at Taiga, £18,000,000; connecting up St Petersburg with a direct line to the Siberian railway, hitherto approached only via Moscow, £9,000,000; the Amur line, connecting the Siberian railway with the eastern coast round the north of Manchuria, thus making it possible to travel from east to west entirely in Russian territory, £31,000,"00: a branch lino from east of Lake Baikal to Kaihkta through the Gobi desert in Mongolia through ITrga, and on to Peking, £15,000,000. This gives a total sum of £95,000,000 which Russia is planning to spend on the opening up of her Eastern Empire.

COMMERCIAN POSSIBILITIEE. So far as the line to Peking'is concerned, it was at first proposed that Russia should bear the cost of the line to Kiahkta, and that the remainder of the work should be carried on by the Chinese authorities. Now Russia announces that she has determined to construct the railway herself as far as Urga, in Mongolia, in order to tap the trade route through Mongolia into China. The continuation of the line to Peking is a matter for the future, and it will be probably constructed under international auspices should the condition of China make her unwilling or unable to undertake the work.'

The great commercial possibilities of Sibera are already being recognised in Europe, especially in Germany. Since the war the Russian objection to foreign consuls has been withdrawn, and the German Government, ever awake to the interests of its- trading community, has established consuls in all the important towns along the Siberian railway, while German commercial travellers are already to be found busily selling their wares from one end 'of Sibera to the other. A few British consuls are also to be found th-cjje, but so far the possibilities of the country have been recognised in but a half-hearted manner both by the British Government nnd British merchants.