ous price, and, in a word, used
every means, legal and illegal, for extracting money. By this system
of management they ruined the estate completely in the course of a few
years; but by that time they had realised probably the whole sum paid,
with a very fair profit from the operation; and this profit could be
considerably augmented by selling a number of the peasant families
for transportation to another estate (na svoz), or by mortgaging the
property in the Opekunski Sovet--a Government institution which lent
money on landed property without examining carefully the nature of the
security.

As to the means which the proprietors possessed of oppressing their
peasants, we must distinguish between the legal and the actual. The
legal were almost as complete as any one could desire. "The proprietor,"
it is said in the Laws (Vol. IX, p. 1045, ed. an. 1857), "may impose on
his serfs every kind of labour, may take from them money dues (obrok)
and demand from them personal service, with this one restriction, that
they should not be thereby ruined, and that the number of days fixed by
law should be left to them for their own work."* Besides this, he had
the right to transform peasants into domestic servants, and might,
instead of employing them in his own service, hire them out to others
who had the rights and privileges of Noblesse (pp. 1047-48). For
all offences committed against himself or against any one under his
jurisdiction he could subject the guilty ones to corporal punishment not
exceeding forty lashes with the birch or fifteen blows with the stick
(p. 1052); and if he considered any of his serfs as incorrigible, he
could present them to the authorities to be drafted into the army or
transported to Siberia as he might desire (pp. 1053-55). In cases of
insubordination, where the ordinary domestic means of discipline did
not suffice, he could call in the police and the military to support his
authority.

* I give here the references to the Code, because Russians
commonly believe and assert that the hiring out of serfs,
the infliction of corporal punishment, and similar practices
were merely abuses unauthorised by law.

Such were the legal means by which the proprietor might oppress
his peasants, and it will be readily understood that they were very
considerable and very elastic. By law he had the power to impose any
dues in labour or money which he might think fit, and in all cases
the serfs were