are brought face to face with the industry for the
first time. The koustar manufactures writing-desks,
pocket-books, albums, furniture, bird-cages from 6d.
up to £4 apiece, pottery, earthenware, porcelain-
ware, majolica and mosaic ware, stone articles,
glass table services, ikons (religious pictures), knives
from id. to £2 each, rifles from 4s. to £320 each,
clocks, watches, lamps, chiselled goods, textile articles,
embroideries, enamels, papier-mache articles painted
with exquisite taste and of fine workmanship, to say
nothing of leather goods and furs.
The beautiful Russian laces have a ready market
in Paris and New York. As for Russian furs, they
represent the last word in luxury and affluence. A
beautiful sable was pressed upon me by an enter-
prising dealer in what is known as the Sunday market
in Moscow. I was told it was the one place in Russia
SHOPPING IN RUSSIA 109
where bargains could be picked up. Scenting a bar-
gain, I asked the lowest price for this modest sable.
Only 135 guineas was named, but as it was the end
of the season, and the new supplies would soon be
forward, this price was reduced to 125 guineas as a
special concession. I said I would take six, on the
usual terms granted at land sales in Australia — viz.
10 per cent, down and the balance spread over as
many years ; but neither the dealer nor the guide
professed to understand me, so, as the auctioneers
say, there was no sale.
Among the many branches of the koustari industry,
the wooden one is the most important. Immense
forests furnish the necessary material. The peasants'
households, as well as their farms, utilise enormous
quantities of woodenware, as the quantity of iron
articles used by them is very small. The manu-
facture of wooden spoons and wooden jars alone keeps
thousands of peasant families busy. This will be
better understood when it is mentioned that 15,000,000
wooden spoons are sold yearly in Russia. They are
decorated and painted by hand with primitive
designs, and are sold to intermediaries at from id.
to 6d. for ten. The jars are used in banks and
shops for silver and copper coin.
The toy industry centres around Moscow, Nijni-
Novgorod, and Vladimir. Russian toys chiefly con-
sist of paste-board, special mastic, wood, or metal.
Ordinarily they are roughly made, very cheap, and
HO AMONG THE HERETICS
within reach of the poorest. Beyond these are the
more expensive toys of artistic and ingenious design,
and for the most part reproducing old Russian styles,
or reflecting the popular phantasy and characteristics.
Among these the most conspicuous are fantastic birds,
bears, troikas, gorgeously dressed boyards, spinning
women, boxes with jack-straws, representing all the
objects of a peasant's home, and nests of boxes
fitting one inside the other, and shaped to represent
peasant types of men and women (matrioschka) or
reproducing scenes in popular Russian fairy tales.
The textile industry includes creations, useful and
artistic, in flax, cotton, wool, silk, and hemp. Usually
most primitive weaving frames are employed by
the koustari ; but they produce articles in no way
inferior, but often superior, in quaUty to those made
in factories. The felt industry has reached a high
degree of perfection. Many millions of pairs of felt
boots are sold annually.
The lace and embroidery industry occupies many
hands. The annual output of the Russian lace in-
dustry is estimated at £3,200,000. The implements
used in this industry are very simple and inexpensive,
consisting of a round cushion, spindle, and pins,
Russian lace is made of white or unbleached thread,
of white, blue or red cotton thread, as well as of
white, black, or pink silk. The lace is manufactured
by the yard, and also in the form of neckerchiefs,
mantles, and entire dresses. They are often of very
SHOPPING IN RUSSIA m
delicate workmanship and beautiful in design. They
repeat ancient traditional designs, permeated by the
poetical influence of centuries of peaceful work,
accomplished under the sound of melancholy melodies
by the faint light of a resin burner. It has taken
centuries to elaborate these simple Russian designs,
and numberless generations to reproduce them. A
tradition, a sort of custom, was born as immutable
as the customs of the family and their religion.
One of the largest branches of the koustari
industry is religious paintings, principally connected
with the districts of Vladimir and Koursk, where the
yearly output amounts to 2,000,000 ikons painted on
wooden boards, according to unchanging standards,
by peasant men and women. These pious pictures
are seldom entirely painted by the same artist. They
usually pass through many hands. Some paint the
background, others the faces, others the hands, and
others the garments, inscriptions or ornaments, and
so on.
The artistic movement which, at the end of the
last century, found its expression in England, and
regenerated the industrial art of Europe, did not
remain unnoticed in Russia. The desire to embellish
the daily Ufe, to render more beautiful the surround-
ing objects, the romantic aspiration towards naive
forms and designs, and at the same time the need to
educate and develop the artistic taste of the people,
revived in Russian industrial art the national style.
ti2 AMONG THE HERETICS
The artists who worked with the object of giving
a national direction to the industry of the koustari
were led also by more utihtarian purposes, by the
desire to facilitate the sale of products the workman-
ship and rudimentary forms of which, notwithstanding
their cheapness, could only with difficulty withstand
the competition of the great industry. A whole
galaxy of painters consecrated their efforts to give
a new life to the artistic tradition of the koustari
production.
The best specimens of Russia's early industrial
art, ancient ornaments, Nature studies, popular
legends, and fairy tales, provided inexhaustible
motives. Some follow the ancient ornamentation,
others only get their inspiration from it, and intro-
duce a modern note in the forms, designs, and colour-
ing of the ancients. Certain details surprise one by
their unexpectedness, their picturesque simplicity,
their audacious originahty. One recognises in them
a special beauty, antiquated, fairy-like, Slavonic to a
degree, yet ever ingenious, not to say " barbaric "
and intimate.
As yet, the products of this industry are sold
abroad as articles de luxe, but a larger and wider
field of remuneration is rapidly being cultivated.
CHAPTER XII
THE SCHOOLMASTER IN EUROPE
The past decade has seen remarkable changes in
Europe as affecting the prestige and power of the
Roman Catholic Church. That she is rapidly losing
her hold and influence not only in Italy, Spain,
Portugal, and France, but in every other country on
the Continent, is patent to the most casual traveller.
I asked a gentleman whose special business it is to
travel all over south-eastern Europe — who knows
that part of Europe like a book, and comes into close
contact with the people actively associated with the
away-from-Rome movements — ^what were the primary
causes of Rome's declining influence. Here is his
testimony in his own words : —
" It is due, first of all, to the modernist movement
all over Europe, and further, to the coming of the
schoolmaster, the popularising of scientific education,
and the opening up of educational centres. All these
things tend to break the power of Rome. The
Vatican authorities are continually issuing futile
encyclicals against modern education, and are placing
upon the Index scientific books commonly read by
an ordinary EngHsh grammar school boy. The
114 AMONG THE HERETICS
natural result is that the forbidden fruit becomes
more desirable and luscious to those who wish to
taste.
" The most marked results are to be seen in
Austria, where, as the outcome of the Los Von Rome
movement scores of priests have left the Roman
Catholic Church and gone into secular occupations.
So strong has this movement become that there is
now actually a union or society of ex-priests founded
for mutual help and inspiration.
" Rome is making a desperate effort to get a foot-
hold in the Balkan Peninsula, and at great expense —
a lavish expenditure of money — ^has estabhshed
schools and churches in Montenegro and parts of
Macedonia ; but up to the present her hold upon the
country has been practically nil. In Hungary she is
losing ground rapidly. Kossuth, in Hungary, like
Mazzini in Italy, taught the people that the road to
poHtical freedom was barred by clerical intolerance.
Clericalism has always been the enemy of the people.
Kossuth's watchword was, ' Clericahsm is the enemy.'
The successful issue of the revolution opened the way
for Protestant propaganda, with the result that all
over Hungary strong and flourishing Protestant
churches have been founded.
" Spain, in her revolt against Rome, is passing
through what Hungary experienced fifty years ago.
In the very heart of Roman Catholicism, Rome has
lost her hold upon the people. Apart from one or
THE SCHOOLMASTER IN EUROPE 115
two well-defined districts, Italy is now one of the
least Roman Catholic countries in Europe.
" Even in Bohemia, Norbert Capek is able to get
open-air meetings, and is patiently listened to while
he exposes the universal meaning of Romanism.
He edits a weekly paper with a circulation of 30,000
copies, and its pages are devoted entirely to an
exposition of Protestant principles and an exposure
of the hollo wness of Roman pretensions. We can
confidently look to the time when Bohemia will once
again return to the faith of John Huss, the martyr
saint of Prague.
" The significant feature of the movement in
Prague is that the city council have at last sanc-
tioned the placing of a medaUion portrait of John
Huss on the front of the building where the great
Protestant Uved and laboured. In thirty years there
have been brought into the Baptist churches of
Hungary alone over 30,000 members, and the num-
ber is increasing at the rate of over 2,500 a year.
The present treasurer of the Baptist Union of Hungary
was seven years ago a Roman Catholic priest. Some
of the denomination's finest workers and preachers
are converts from Roman Cathohcism.
" Three years ago, in Genoa, the bishops and
priests of the city attempted to hold a procession of
the Annunciation. They had only proceeded a few
yards from the church dedicated to the Virgin Mary
when the citizens seized the crucifixes, the Host, the
ii6 AMONG THE HERETICS
banners, and all the panoply of a Roman Catholic
procession, dashed them to the ground, and drove
the processionists back into the church. That would
have been impossible ten years ago. It may be a
small circumstance, but it denotes the modern
tendency to break away from Rome.
" From careful inquiries which I have made
throughout the whole of south-eastern Europe, I have
learned that the attendance of men at Roman Cathohc
services is less than lo per cent, of the entire con-
gregation. With the increase of education and the
decrease of ^ Roman Catholic schools, this tendency
will become more marked. It is a revolt against
priestcraft by people whose eyes have been opened.
No modern pohtical reformer in any country in
Europe has remained loyal to the Roman Catholic
Church. He has clearly seen that religious and
political liberty must go hand in hand, and in some
instances he has discovered that the progress of
pohtical hberty depends upon the obstruction of
Papal supremacy. Even where men have desired to
remain loyal to the Church, the retrograde edicts
issued from the Vatican have compelled them to
withdraw.
" In Europe we are on the threshold of a second
but greater and purer Reformation. In this reforma-
tion the prime workers and outstanding leaders will
be men of the Protestant faith. For thirty years
they have been quietly working until at last they
THE SCHOOLMASTER IN EUROPE 117
have become a force to be reckoned with. The
pioneers are still with us, men whose imprisonment
and social ostracism, the loss of goods and of houses,
have been but a spur to greater and nobler effort.
They have in their hearts a passionate love for Jesus
Christ and an intense desire for the salvation of their
fellow men. One of the foremost leaders of the
Baptist movement in Italy is a young man, an ex-
priest, who is wielding an immense influence in
industrial centres. The Baptist brethren are every-
where being federated into a world alliance that they
may stand by the brethren in Europe and elsewhere,
and give them every support and encouragement in
the great work in which they are engaged."
CHAPTER XIII
THE LAND OF THE INQUISITION
Spain is a land of strange contrasts. It is one of
the most beautiful countries in the world ; yet it is
a land of darkness, superstition, and sluggish develop-
ment, and its glories belong to the past rather than
the present. To the casual observer the life of the
Spanish people appears to be hopelessly barren and
unfruitful of anything that is good or ennobhng ; but
a more intimate acquaintance discloses the fact that
with all their faults they are a kindly disposed and
lovable race, and that their national trait is hospitality.
In estimating the national character, however, one
has to distinguish between the north and the south,
for the two are scarcely comparable. In the north
the people are as thrifty and industrious as in the
south they are improvident and indolent. Everything
is more or less primitive in the way of cultivation ;
but in the north the fields are everywhere pictures of
industry, while farther south brown arid plains are
the rule rather than the exception.
Crossing the frontier from France the traveller
experiences none of those annoyances from military
or poUce officers with regard to passports that are
ii8
THE LAND OF THE INQUISITION 119
so trying to patience and temper in Russia. I was
advised to take every precaution in the matter, and
carried in my pocket papers which represented all the
security and protection which the British Govern-
ment had the right to ask on my behalf ; but during
the month that I spent in Spain I was not asked once
to produce my passport. This was all the more
remarkable considering the unsettled state of the
country, produced by the riots at Barcelona, which
had scarcely had time to die down.
There were disabihties, but they belonged to the
order of red tape. Immediately on passing the turn-
stile from the French to the Spanish side of the rail-
way station at Irun, for instance, I was made aware of
the fact that nowhere outside of the Tsar's territory
are the movements of the people more foolishly
entangled with Government tape than in the home
of the Inquisition. I had booked through second
class from London to Madrid, but on presenting my
ticket at Irun I was peremptorily forbidden to pass
the turnstile. It took eight or nine officials to impress
on me that something was wrong with my ticket, and
their concerted jabbering was worse than anything
that could have been experienced when the Tower
of Babel was a-building. I could not speak a
word of their language, and a small collection of
books telling travellers what to say in Spanish
and how to say it failed to give any comfort or
enlightenment. Books of this class, hke Bible com-
120 AMONG THE HERETICS
mentaries, never by any chance tell a man what he
wants to know.
I was in a fix. The train for Madrid was due to
start. Had I known it, that was the last thing I
need have worried about. Trains in Spain do not
start by the clock, but when the engine-driver and
the guard, and perchance the station-master, have
finished their cigars ! Apparently they must have
only just started their " smoke," for it was fully
two hours after the scheduled time that this particular
train puffed out of the station. And I was not on
board !
A French lady saved the situation for me, or I
might yet have been exchanging compliments with the
excited, jabbering officials. It seems that I had been
guilty of a grave offence. Mine was a second-class
ticket of the " ordinary " kind ; but as there were
no " ordinary " trains that day connecting Irun with
Madrid, freight had been raised, and I was not to
be allowed to pass the turnstile until I had paid the
equivalent of another fourteen shillings in Enghsh
silver. Having solved that Httle difficulty I natur-
ally wanted to catch the outgoing train. But there
were other difficulties. Again the inexorable arm of
the law interposed. Why, I could not understand.
A second excited altercation ensued, the odds being
against me. Six oratorical Spanish wrestlers to one
faltering and half-frightened Kangaroo ! Neither
side knew what the other was talking about.
THE LAND OF THE INQUISITION 121
This time a German, who somewhat rashly pro-
fessed to be able to speak Enghsh, came to the rescue,
though it took him a long time to unravel the mystery
and nearly as long again to make me understand his
EngUsh. The official explanation given through this
obliging gentleman turned my wrath into laughter,
and I immediately withdrew all my imprecations
of the major and minor Spanish railway officials.
I told the German that the Spanish wit was some-
thing hereafter to swear by, and that it was worth
travelling from Australia to get one's humour sharp-
ened on such a grindstone. He professed to under-
stand my meaning, but took it so solemnly that I
was certain he had failed to share the joke. Indeed,
before we parted company I had secured ample con-
firmation of a theory which had begun to take shape
in Russia — i.e. that it is much easier to understand a
man who talks to you in an unknown tongue than
to try to understand the foreigner who essays the
role of sympathetic interpreter. It is the most
painfully pathetic and potent illustration that could
be offered to justify the dictum that a little know-
ledge is a dangerous thing.
Will it be beheved in any civihsed country out-
side of Europe that the reason why I was not allowed
to travel by that outgoing train for Madrid, while
holding a second class ticket on which raised freights
had been levied, was that there were no second class
carriages on the train ? Anxious to reach Madrid,
122 AMONG THE HERETICS
I airily waived my privileges aside and asked to be
allowed to travel third class. They were horrified.
Since the world began was it ever heard in Spain that
any man possessed of a second class ticket was
anxious to travel third class. " Then may I pay
the difference and travel first class ? " That was
an equally impossible proposition, and I was forced
to capitulate and wait four hours longer for a seat
in a second class carriage !
However, it was my first sight of Spain, and there
was much to interest one even at a frontier station.
The Spanish railway official is the most easy-going
person to be met with in Europe, which is saying
much. His nonchalance is something to conjure
with. Time, tides, trains, and trams are proverbially
said not to wait for any man ; but the proverb does
not hold in Spain. For the Spanish railway official
all these things have to wait. And the official in gold
braid is neither better nor worse than the meanest
subordinate. The " tired feeUng " is chronic in
Spain — even the railway engines refuse to be hustled.
It was a novel sight that on the railway platform
at Irun every official, whether station-master, poHce-
man, mihtary officer, soldier, porter, ganger, cabman,
was smoking a cigar. The only persons to be seen
smoking the humbler cigarette — and I took particular
note — were the long-suffering people who were pro-
viding the officials with their cigars — viz. the travel-
ling pubhc.
THE LAND OF THE INQUISITION 123
Everybody smokes in Spain, but nobody smokes
a pipe. Except for a casual traveller, I never saw
a pipe being smoked in Spain or exhibited in the
tobacconists' shops. The rule applies largely through-
out Europe, In Russia everybody smokes cigarettes.
I had purchased a fairly roomy calabash pipe at
Colombo. This, with some Austrahan " plug "
tobacco, evoked more interest and gained for me more
friends than anything else. When travelling from
Madrid to Escorial these innocent articles inspired
quite an impromptu levee- among the passengers, at
which I did the honours. There was a party of pro-
fessional guides on board, bound, hke myself, for
Escorial. At first I had a third class corridor com-
partment to myself, and was smoking the pipe of
peace in the hope, at the first analysis, that it would
prove a necessary disinfectant. Spaniards are con-
spicuously restless and curious when travelling, and
leave no part of a train unexplored.
It was not long before one of the guides found me
out. I should not have noticed his intrusion but
for his courteous salutation, without which no
Spaniard comes into another's presence, be he
stranger or friend. In a moment or two he was
away again ; but he quickly returned, and in his
train came several other guides. Between them they
filled up the vacant seats in front and on either side
of me, and from each came the customary salutation.
Glancing up a httle later I saw by the expression on
124 AMONG THE HERETICS
their faces that something was amusing them. As
I looked at each in turn and exchanged smiles, one
of them pointed to my pipe and said something at
which they all laughed. I held it toward the guide
nearest to me for inspection, and it was passed round
as gingerly as a cocked revolver.
The cHmax was reached when I pulled out a plug
of " Welcome Nugget " and began to cut up another
pipeful and light it. Before I had got properly going
each of the guides had departed ; but only to circu-
late the news, and before Escorial was reached every
man and woman on that train had come to have a
look at the foreigner and his pipe and examine the
strange tobacco. But that was not enough for the
guides. Their curiosity had not been satisfied. They
wanted to sample the plug tobacco, and I cut them
each off a pipeful. One of them immediately rolled
his in a cigarette paper and tried to smoke it, but
could make nothing of it. When I had explained
that it was only pipe tobacco, each lovingly folded
his sample in paper and stored it away, presumably
as a keepsake or as an exhibit for some museum.
Had I been so minded that bit of tobacco would have
commanded the services of either or all of those
guides free of charge during my stay in Escorial.
CHAPTER XIV
CONCERNING BANDITS AND POLITICIANS
As a boy the cut-throat bandit, the prevailing type
of Spaniard in books of adventure, appealed to my
imagination. But I had no desire to meet any of
these gentlemen in the flesh on their native heath,
and being, like John Gilpin, on pleasure bent, I had
no such expectations. Long before we were across
the Pyrenees, however, I got a shock which thrilled
me more than any bandit story I had ever read. It
was a clear, moonlight night, and the mountains
were capped with snow. There was nobody in the
compartment I occupied, so about midnight I got up
and took a stroll through the corridor train. There
was not a soul besides myself in the second-class part
of the train. At first there was the thought of some-
thing being amiss. Then, as I remembered the
" raised freights " and the tips at Irun, there came
the reflection that after all hfe had its compensations,
and that having the train all to myself was assuredly
the correct thing, seeing that by all the laws of
justice I had paid for it !
But my loneHness was transient. At Medini the
train filled up, and into the carriage came five as
125
126 AMONG THE HERETICS
ruffianly-looking fellows as I ever want to meet in
the middle of the night in a strange mountainous
country. The men looked hke bandits of the most
approved type — or so, under the circumstances, they
appeared to me. They were certainly dressed hke
bandits, or what my boyhood's reading had always
pictured as bandits. These men might have stepped
out of a story-book or a theatrical poster. They wore
the conventional cloak, held so as to cover every part
of the face but the eyes, and huge sombrero hats.
Worse still, on the platform, pacing up and down in
the moonlight, were dozens of similarly dressed men,
I confess to having been scared, and there was nobody
to ask what it meant, or so I concluded in my sudden
apprehension. Judge of my surprise, then, as the
train started, to receive a polite salutation from each