fficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results
of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic
cooeperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might,
perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent
caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary
coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or
even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them
depends.

Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that
presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people.
Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that
the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily
worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the
well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that
Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole
peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof
and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat
had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by
competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in
European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who
possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper
allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on
Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported
that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the
net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct
taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land
enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967
were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and
ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net
proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a
daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33]
One might have expected the government to do something for the relief
of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of
aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to
the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr.
Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two,
Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police
surveillance; an