all classes were benefited
by it, not only morally, but also materially; whilst the others strove
to represent the proprietors in general, and themselves in particular,
as the self-sacrificing victims of a great and necessary patriotic
reform--as martyrs in the cause of liberty and progress. I do not for
a moment suppose that these two groups of witnesses had a clearly
conceived intention of deceiving or misleading, but as a cautious
investigator I had to make allowance for their idealising and
sentimental tendencies.

Since that time the situation has become much clearer, and during
recent visits to Russia I have been able to arrive at much more definite
conclusions. These I now proceed to communicate to the reader.

The Emancipation caused the proprietors of all classes to pass through
a severe economic crisis. Periods of transition always involve much
suffering, and the amount of suffering is generally in the inverse ratio
of the precautions taken beforehand. In Russia the precautions had
been neglected. Not one proprietor in a hundred had made any serious
preparations for the inevitable change. On the eve of the Emancipation
there were about ten millions of male serfs on private properties, and
of these nearly seven millions remained under the old system of paying
their dues in labour. Of course, everybody knew that Emancipation must
come sooner or later, but fore-thought, prudence, and readiness to take
time by the forelock are not among the prominent traits of the Russian
character. Hence most of the land-owners were taken unawares. But while
all suffered, there were differences of degree. Some were completely
shipwrecked. So long as serfage existed all the relations of life were
ill-defined and extremely elastic, so that a man who was hopelessly
insolvent might contrive, with very little effort, to keep his bead
above water for half a lifetime. For such men the Emancipation, like a
crisis in the commercial world, brought a day of reckoning. It did not
really ruin them, but it showed them and the world at large that they
were ruined, and they could no longer continue their old mode of life.
For others the crisis was merely temporary. These emerged with a larger
income than they ever had before, but I am not prepared to say that
their material condition has improved, because the social habits have
changed, the cost of living has become much greater, and the work of
administering estates is incomparably more compl