A great deal of news, as we regard news, never gets into the papers at all, or is compressed into very small space. For example there have been a number of terrible railroad accidents on the Russian roads. Most of these one never heard of unless some one he knew happened to be killed or injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great fatality was permitted.

Thus an express train between Moscow and Petrograd was wrecked, forty persons being killed and more than seventy injured. This wreck got a whole paragraph in the newspapers, with no list of the dead and injured and no explanation of the cause. The fact is that the railroads are in a condition of complete demoralization and the only wonder is that more wrecks do not occur.

Book Details