still cough and am thin. There is the whole story for you. If it had not
been for the influenza we might together perhaps have succeeded in
extracting two or three thousand or more from the public.

Your exasperation with the press I can quite understand. The lucubrations
of the journalists annoy you who know the true position of affairs, in the
same way as the lucubrations of the profane about diphtheria annoy me as a
doctor. But what would you have? Russia is not England and is not France.
Our newspapers are not rich and they have very few men at their disposal.
To send to the Volga a professor of the Petrovsky Academy or an Engelhardt
is expensive: to send a talented and business-like member of the staff is
impossible too--he is wanted at home. The _Times_ could organize a census
in the famine-stricken provinces at its own expense, could settle a Kennan
in every district, paying him forty roubles a day, and then something
sensible could be done; but what can the _Russkiya Vyedomosti_ or the
_Novoye Vremya_ do, who consider an income of a hundred thousand as the
wealth of Croesus? As for the correspondents themselves, they are townsmen
who know the country only from Glyeb Uspensky. Their position is an utterly
false one, they must fly into a district, sniff about, write, and dash on
further. The Russian correspondent has neither material resources, nor
freedom, nor authority. For two hundred roubles a month he gallops on and
on, and only prays they may not be angry with him for his involuntary and
inevitable misrepresentations. He feels guilty--though it is not he that is
to blame but Russian darkness. The newspaper correspondents of the west
have excellent maps, encyclopaedias, and statistics; in the west they could
write their reports, sitting at home, but among us a correspondent can
extract information only from talk and rumour. Among us in Russia only
three districts have been investigated: the Tcherepov district, the Tambov
district, and one other. That is all in the whole of Russia. The newspapers
tell lies, the correspondents are duffers, but what's to be done? If our