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120
A Policy op Death.
200,000 recruits are yearly enlisted in the army, and of these
only about 50,000 can read. Among the peasants proper the
percentage of illiterates rises to 95 per cent. ! In some parts,
e.g., the district of Novorzhevsk, Kholm, and Tovopetz, in the
neighbourhood of St. Petersburg, there is only one school to
each 200 villages. In these places one finds only from 5 down
to 1 per cent, of children of school age in the schools in
consequence of deficient school space. If Russia had the same
proportion as her neighbour Sweden, for example, she would
have about 250,000 schools, while she actually has only 18,000.
Again, take Russia’s enormous budget of 1,000,000,000
roubles ; of this only 500,000 are devoted to popular
education. That is one-eleventh part of what is devoted to the
maintenance of the Imperial Court ; one six-hundredth part
of the cost of the army, and one two-thousandth part of the
whole. At about the same time Great Britain was spending
about £9,000,000 for elementary education, &c., with a
population little more than a third that of Russia. Moreover,
about two-thirds of this paltry sum of 500,000 roubles goes in
salaries of inspectors.
In fact, Russia stands behind China in point of popular
education, for in the latter country 2-6 per cent, of the
population goes to school, in the former only 2-3 per cent.
In the government of Cherson, by a recent ukase of the
Holy Synod, Stundist peasants are plainly forbidden to allow
their children to be taught to read, and other districts are said
to be threatened with the same treatment because of the
spread of heresy within their borders. Truly the present Russian
Government may fairly be classed among the powers of
darkness.
Not long ago the leaders of the Liberal party sent out
circulars to the local authorities in order to ascertain the exact
facts about education in Russia, or as nearly exact as the
character of the said local authorities would allow. This
would have given too intense a light for the bat-like vision of
the Holy Synod. Pobiedanostseff at once sent his circular, too,
to the same authorities, reminding them that they were under
no obligation to reply to these questions, and this was followed
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