Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/741

The Russian Empire in the Nineteenth Century 561 Occasional protests were answered by imprisonment, flogging, or exile, for Alexander III and his intimate advisers believed quite as firmly and religiously in autocracy as Nicholas I had done. 1019. The Industrial Revolution overtakes Russia. It be- came increasingly difficult, however, to keep Russia "frozen," for during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the spread of democratic ideas had been hastened by the coming of the steam HARBIN, A CITY ON THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY Cities have sprung up along the great Russian railway just as they did along the transcontinental lines in the United States or Canada. This Western- looking town is northeast of Peking, in the farming country of Manchuria, nominally a part of the Chinese Republic but in reality held by Russia engine, the factory, and the railroad, all of which served to un- settle the humdrum agricultural life which the great majority of the people had led for centuries. The liberation of the serfs, with all its drawbacks, favored the growth of factories, for the peasants were sometimes permitted to leave their villages for the manufacturing centers which were gradually growing up. If Napoleon could have come once more to Moscow in 1912, he would not have recognized the city which met his gaze in 1812. It had become one of the chief centers of