property which will not be his in so short a time. Hardly any manure
is used, and in many places the corn is threshed out by driving
horses and wagons over it. The exhaustion of the soil by this most
barbarous culture has reached a fearful pitch."

The size of the allotments varies extremely in the different climates
and soils, and the country is so enormous that the provinces were
divided into zones to carry out the details of the Emancipation
Act--the zone without black soil; the zone with black soil; and,
third, the great steppe zone. In the first two the allotments range
from two and two-thirds to twenty acres, in the steppes from eight
and three-quarters to thirty-four and one-third. "Whether, however,"
says Jensen, "the peasants cultivate their land as proprietors at
1_s_. 9_d_. or hire it at 18_s_. 6_d_. the result is the same--the
soil is scourged and exhausted, and semi-starvation has become the
general feature of peasant life."

Usury is the great nightmare of rural Russia, at present, an evil
which seems to dog the peasant proprietor in all countries alike.
The "Gombeen Man" is fast getting possession of the little Irish
owners. A man who hires land cannot borrow on it; the little owner
is tempted always to mortgage it at a pinch. In Russia he borrows to
the outside of its value to pay the taxes and get in his crop. "The
bondage labourers," _i. e._, men bound to work on their creditor's
land as interest for money lent, receive no wages and are in fact a
sort of slaves. They repay their extortioners by working as badly
as they can--a "level worst," far inferior to that of the serfs of
old, they harvest three and a half or four stacks of corn where
the other peasants get five. The Koulaks and Mir-eaters, and other
usurers, often of peasant origin, exhaust the peasant in every
way; they then foreclose the mortgages, unite the small pieces
of land once more, and reconstitute large estates. A Koulak is
not to be trifled with; he finds a thousand occasions for revenge;
the peasant cannot cheat the Jew as he does the landlord, and is
being starved out--the mortality is enormous.

The peasant class comprises five-sixths of the whole population--a
stolid, ignorant, utterly unprogressive mass of human beings. They
have received in gift nearly half the empire for their own use,
and cling to the soil as their only chance of existence. They
consequently dread all change, fearing that it should endanger
this valuable