condition. When Peter the Great, with his terrible broom, swept all
the free peasants into the same mass with the unfree serfs, and when he
established the empire upon a chain of service to be rendered to the
nobility by the peasantry, and then to the state by the nobility, he
simply applied to the whole state the Slavonic principle existing in
the social unit--the family. And while he was Europeanizing the
surface, he was completing a structure of paternalism, which was
Asiatic and incompatible with its new garment--an incongruity which in
time must bring disorder, and compel radical and difficult reforms.

To remove a foundation stone is a delicate and difficult operation. It
needed courage of no ordinary sort to break up this serfdom encrusted
with tyrannies. It was a gigantic social experiment, the results of
which none could foresee. Alexander's predecessors had thought and
talked of it, but had not dared to try it. Now the time was ripe, and
the man on the throne had the nerve required for its execution.

The means by which this revolution was effected may be briefly
described in a sentence. The Crown purchased from the proprietors the
land--with the peasants attached to it, and then bestowed the land upon
the peasants with the condition that for forty-five years they should
pay to the Crown six per cent. interest upon the amount paid by it for
the land. It was the commune or _mir_ which accepted the land and
assumed the obligation and the duty of seeing that every individual
paid his annual share of rental (or interest money) upon the land
within his inclosure, which was supposed to be sufficient for his own
maintenance and the payment of the government tax.

These simple people, who had been dreaming of emancipation for years,
as a vague promise of relief from sorrow, heard with astonishment that
now they were expected to pay for their land! Had it not always
belonged to them? The Slavonic idea of ownership of land through labor
was the only one of which they could conceive, and it had survived
through all the centuries of serfdom, when they were accustomed to say:
"We are yours, but the land is ours." Instead of twenty-five million
people rejoicing with grateful hearts, there was a ferment of
discontent and in some places uprisings--one peasant leader telling ten
thousand who rose at his call that the Emancipation Law was a forgery,
they were being deceived and not permitted to enjoy what the Tsar,