re than half of the peasants who made a journey of
fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could
not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had
hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]

If the government fails to relieve the land famine by selling its own
land reserves, by making loans to the people through the Peasants'
Bank, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, it will find itself
threatened by two very serious dangers. On the one hand, the
diminishing power of the peasants to pay taxes will ultimately affect
the national revenue and impair the revenue of the state; and, on the
other hand, the discontent and exasperation of the great class from
which soldiers are drawn will sooner or later infect the army and
lessen the power of the autocracy to enforce its authority. The
government is now drafting about 460,000 recruits a year, and these
conscripts not only share the feelings of the peasantry as a whole,
but belong largely to the very class that has recently been in revolt.
Tens of thousands of them either participated in or sympathized with
the agrarian riots of 1905-6; and not a few of them, remembering how
the troops were then sent against them, solemnly promised their
fellow-villagers, when they joined the colors, that they would never
fire upon their brothers, even if ordered to do so by the Czar
himself. An army of this temper is a weapon that may become very
dangerous to its wielders; and if the discontent and hostility of the
peasants continue to increase with increasing impoverishment, and if
the hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits carry their discontent and
hostility into their barracks, the government may have to deal with
mutinies and revolts much more serious than those of Cronstadt,
Sveaborg, and the Crimea. Certain it is that an army is not likely to
remain loyal when there is wide-spread disaffection in the population
from which it is drawn; and in the present condition, temper, and
attitude of the peasants we may find reasons enough for the "trouble
to come" that Mr. Milyukov predicts.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Otherwise known as the "Black Hundreds." This reactionary and
terroristic organization impudently pretended to represent the "true
Russian people"; but in the election for the third Duma, when it had
all the encouragement and help that the bureaucracy could give, it was
able to send to the electoral colleges only 72 electors