LD: three
coachmen, well trained and handsome; and two girls, the one eighteen,
and the other fifteen years of age, both of them good-looking, and well
acquainted with various kinds of handiwork. In the same house there are
for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of age, can read,
write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the other can
dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair. In the same house are sold pianos
and organs."

A little farther on in the same number of the paper, a first-rate clerk,
a carver, and a lackey are offered for sale, and the reason assigned is
a superabundance of the articles in question (za izlishestvom). In some
instances it seems as if the serfs and the cattle were intentionally put
in the same category, as in the following announcement: "In this house
one can buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve." The style of
these advertisements, and the frequent recurrence of the same
addresses, show that there was at this time in Moscow a regular class of
slave-dealers. The humane Alexander I. prohibited advertisements of this
kind, but he did not put down the custom which they represented, and his
successor, Nicholas I., took no effective measures for its repression.

Of the whole number of serfs belonging to the proprietors, the domestics
formed, according to the census of 1857, no less than 6 3/4 per cent.
(6.79), and their numbers were evidently rapidly increasing, for in the
preceding census they represented only 4.79 per cent. of the whole. This
fact seems all the more significant when we observe that during this
period the number of peasant serfs had diminished.

I must now bring this long chapter to an end. My aim has been to
represent serfage in its normal, ordinary forms rather than in its
occasional monstrous manifestations. Of these latter I have a collection
containing ample materials for a whole series of sensation novels, but
I refrain from quoting them, because I do not believe that the criminal
annals of a country give a fair representation of its real condition. On
the other hand, I do not wish to whitewash serfage or attenuate its
evil consequences. No great body of men could long wield such enormous
uncontrolled power without abusing it,* and no large body of men could
long live under such power without suffering morally and materially from
its pernicious influence. If serfage did not create that moral apathy
and intellectual lethargy which formed, as i