After visiting the principal cities of
Canada and the United States from Quebec to Vancouver, and from Boston
to Washington, (some of them more than once,) Dr. Alexyeeff arrived at
the conclusion that the hospitals of the United States were better built
and much better administered than those of London, Paris, Berlin, and
Vienna.
Naturally, no one could spend nine months in investigating hospitals and
prisons in this country without coming in contact with the liquor
problem. Moreover, Dr. Alexyeeff was a wideawake man, who took an
interest not only in all matters connected with his profession, but in
very many outside of it. He was, also, a man of very lofty character.
His wife once wrote me concerning him somewhat as follows: "He walks,
habitually, on such moral heights, in such a rarefied spiritual
atmosphere, that I, the daughter of an English clergyman, reared
accordingly, and myself (as you know) deeply in sympathy with it, find
difficulty in following him." Obviously, he was precisely the man to
appreciate the temperance movement, and to carry it to its logical
conclusion. In the preface to a volume, "About America," which he
published in Moscow in 1888, he writes:
Neither the wonders of wild nature in the Rocky Mountains nor
the menacing might and grandeur of Niagara produce such an
impression on a Russian as the success of the fight with
drunkenness--the temperance movement--and the successful
development, in all classes of society, of morality and the
strict application of practical morals.
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