Article text from "The Referee and Cycle Trade", November 18, 1895
The full text of this (alas) unillustrated item is above, but I provide some highlights below.
CHANGING THE RUSSIAN - The Bicycle Said to Be Putting a New Face on Muscovite Characteristics.and this extended reference to Tolstoy~
. . . Not only does the new steed rule in the hurried Anglo-Saxon lands and in the busy Germany, but the Gaul and the Slav and the women of both have been swept away by the fashion and the Bois de Boulogne and the winding alleys of Yelaguine island are even as Battersea park. . .
Carry the cycle into the world of thought; we can see at once that it has effected, or is effecting, a vast and subtile change. Already the mysticism of the Slav character must have received its deathblow. Introspection is essential to the mystic. Now, he who cycles (also she), if he introspects, is sure to be reminded with painful suddenness of the solidity of externals. Even a Russian mystic will become more practical after running into a steam-roller or down the bank of a canal. The familiar types of Muscovite fiction will vanish or remain but as fossils in a museum. The Tolstoic creed (which is not, by the way, the Tolstoic practice) of property, asceticism and non-resistance is blown to the winds in a sprint through the parks. Preach to a cyclist that all cycles, his own in particular, should be the property of everybody; that it is his duty to abstain from riding, especially on his own machine; and that he must take cheerfully the cutting of his tires—and in a second you will be preaching to the eddying dust, while the breeze bears back to you the lessening sound of a scornful toot.
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