ordered to be docile and obedient (p. 1027). Corporal
punishment, though restricted by law, he could in reality apply to any
extent. Certainly none of the serfs, and very few of the proprietors,
were aware that the law placed any restriction on this right. All the
proprietors were in the habit of using corporal punishment as they
thought proper, and unless a proprietor became notorious for inhuman
cruelty the authorities never thought of interfering. But in the eyes
of the peasants corporal punishment was not the worst. What they feared
infinitely more than the birch or the stick was the proprietor's power
of giving them or their sons as recruits. The law assumed that this
extreme means would be employed only against those serfs who showed
themselves incorrigibly vicious or insubordinate; but the authorities
accepted those presented without making any investigations, and
consequently the proprietor might use this power as an effective means
of extortion.

Against these means of extortion and oppression the serfs had no
legal protection. The law provided them with no means of resisting any
injustice to which they might be subjected, or of bringing to
punishment the master who oppressed and ruined them. The Government,
notwithstanding its sincere desire to protect them from inordinate
burdens and cruel treatment, rarely interfered between the master and
his serfs, being afraid of thereby undermining the authority of
the proprietors, and awakening among the peasantry a spirit of
insubordination. The serfs were left, therefore, to their own resources,
and had to defend themselves as best they could. The simplest way was
open mutiny; but this was rarely employed, for they knew by experience
that any attempt of the kind would be at once put down by the military
and mercilessly punished. Much more favourite and efficient methods were
passive resistance, flight, and fire-raising or murder.

We might naturally suppose that an unscrupulous proprietor, armed with
the enormous legal and actual power which I have just described, could
very easily extort from his peasants anything he desired. In reality,
however, the process of extortion, when it exceeded a certain measure,
was a very difficult operation. The Russian peasant has a capacity
of patient endurance that would do honour to a martyr, and a power of
continued, dogged, passive resistance such as is possessed, I believe,
by no other class of men in Europe; and these qualities