"July, 1899, Tchita," and
from Tchita I received my copy from him. In that preface he states the
scope of his book in a way which confirms my conviction that Mr.
Tchelisheff was first stirred to interest, and in the end aroused to
action, by the United States, via Dr. Alexyeeff. He writes:

The battle which in all ages has been waged against
drunkenness has been confined hitherto almost exclusively to
the realms of medicine and ethics; the social part of the
question is only just beginning to be worked out, and has
hardly as yet won the rights of citizenship, and down to our
own day there have been no serious legal measures adopted for
the battle with drunkenness.

Therefore, he omits the legal aspects of the matter in his book and
confines himself to an attempt at popularizing the information scattered
in divers individual books, "borrowing everything which can lead to the
ultimate goal--the extermination of the evil caused by the use of
spirituous drinks." He continues:

Public opinion has nowhere as yet, even in the lands where
considerable success has attended the war on drunkenness,
ripened sufficiently a desire to give, even incompletely, a
summary of the information about that battle, and make my
fellow-countrymen acquainted with a matter still little known
in Russia, so I am prompted to write what follows.

The second edition of this book, with the surprising list of Russian
treatises on drunkenness to which I have already alluded, is dated
"June, 1895, Riga," where he lived after his return from Siberia, as an
official of the Government medical service, until his death in August,
1913. During the stay in Tchita of the Alexyeeffs, the present Emperor
(then the heir,) passed through it, on his way home (from the trip to
India and Japan which came so near terminating fatally in the latter
country) after having officially opened work upon the construction of
the Trans-Siberian Railway, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. A formal
reception and ceremonies were organized in Tchita; and I allude to the
matter because of a curious detail mentioned in a letter to me by Mrs.
Alexyeeff. Foreigners have very queer ideas, she said, as to the
position and treatment of the political exiles in Siberia; some of the
Tchita exiles served as heads of the committees for welcoming the heir,
and he shook hands with them and treated them exactly as he treated the
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