ing
unable to put it to good use would rapidly become paupers. The best
men in the Duma opposed Stolypin's bill, and the law was introduced by
stealth and promulgated during a forced recess of the Duma. Contrary
to expectation the law neither led to the results desired by the
Government, nor to those feared by Constitutional Democrats. It
remained a dead letter. Few members of peasant communities applied for
separation. The Government tried to boost its scheme by building at its
own expense model, fake peasant homes. The peasants had already their
own idea as to remedies in regard to land shortage and did not want any
substitute.

The difficulty of making the peasant respect the principle of private
ownership of land is due to many causes. The most liberal minded
landowners were usually those who spent their winters in various
occupations in large cities and used their estates as summer homes and
a partial source of income. The work of supervision was only too often
intrusted to utterly unscrupulous and uneducated managers belonging to
the peasant class, while the neighboring peasants were employed as
day laborers in the field and garden. This kind of labor was already
available, because peasants were unable to derive sufficient income from
their own land to pay the heavy taxes and to support their families.
Scarcely any landowners understood anything of agriculture and few paid
any attention to it. I know splendid estates which brought in miserable
incomes, not normal even under the antiquated system of four year crop
rotation and quite absurd if measured by standards of modern American
farming, yet sufficient to place at the disposal of the owners a
splendid mansion in Moscow or Petrograd and a no less splendid summer
home on their estate. There, during the hot summer days, the owners were
enjoying their comfort in idleness and talking of reforms necessary for
the benefit of the peasants, while peasant women were cutting the wheat
for them with sickles, stooping and sweating under the scorching rays of
the sun. The superintendents of those estates enriched themselves at the
expense of the blind or careless and carefree owners under the very eyes
of the peasants who hated the superintendents, pitied or despised the
liberal owners, as the case might be, and gloomily compared their own
poverty and labor with the ease and wealth of their employers.

The more thrifty and less liberal owners, who remained the greater part