At the same time it is necessary to closely guard the frontier in order to prevent, as I have said, the importation of books and bombs, the two elements in western civilization of which Russia seems to stand most in fear.
Leaving our droske on the Austrian side of the boundary, Doctor Park and myself applied at the gate between the two countries. A big, good-natured Russian official grinned, but shook his head and indicated that we could not be allowed to cross over. Our driver spoke to him in Polish, but he did not understand, or pretended he did not. Then we found a man who could speak Russian as well as German, and through him we explained that we merely wanted to visit the town and be able to say that we had at least touched Russian soil. On this the man permitted us to go up to the customs office and make our request there. At the customs office we tried to look as harmless as possible, and, with the aid of the interpreter we had brought with us, I explained what we wanted.
At the customs office every one was polite, good-humoured, and apparently quite as much interested in us as we were in them. I was told, however, that I should have to wait until a certain higher and more important personage arrived. In the course of half an hour the more important personage appeared. He looked us over carefully, listened to the explanations of his subordinates, and then, smiling good-naturedly, gave us permission to look about the village. With this gracious permission we started out.
The first thing I noticed was that the smooth, hard road upon which we had travelled from Cracow to the frontier broke off abruptly on the Russian side of the border. The road through the village was full of ruts and mudholes and the mournful and mud-bedraggled teams which were standing near the gate, waiting to cross the border, showed only too plainly the difficulties of travel in the country through which they had passed. Now I had learned in Europe that roads are a pretty good index of the character of the governments that maintain them, so that it was not difficult to see at the outset that the Russians were very poor housekeepers, so to speak, at least as compared with their Austrian neighbours. This was evidently not due to a lack of men and officials to do the work. Counting the civil officials and the soldiers, I suppose there must have been somewhere between twenty and thirty persons, and perhaps more, stationed at this little border village, to collect the toll on the petty traffic that crossed at this point. They were, however, but part of the vast army of officials and soldiers which the Russian Empire maintains along its western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to keep the watch between the east and the west; to halt, inspect, and tax, not merely the ordinary traffic, but the interchange of sentiments and ideas.