gion--will not
admit that any permanent advantage has been derived from this enormous
increase in exports. On the contrary, they maintain that it is a
national misfortune, because it is leading rapidly to a state of
permanent impoverishment. It quickly exhausted, they say, the large
reserves of grain in the village, so that as soon as there was a very
bad harvest the Government had to come to the rescue and feed the
starving peasantry. Worse than this, it compromised the future
prosperity of the country. Being in pecuniary difficulties, and
consequently impatient to make money, the proprietors increased
inordinately the area of grain-producing land at the expense of
pasturage and forests, with the result that the live stock and the
manuring of the land were diminished, the fertility of the soil
impaired, and the necessary quantity of moisture in the atmosphere
greatly lessened. There is some truth in this contention; but it would
seem that the soil and climate have not been affected so much as the
pessimists suppose, because in recent years there have been some very
good harvests.

On the whole, then, I think it may be justly said that the efforts of
the landed proprietors to work their estates without serf labour have
not as yet been brilliantly successful. Those who have failed are in the
habit of complaining that they have not received sufficient support from
the Government, which is accused of having systematically sacrificed the
interests of agriculture, the mainstay of the national resources, to the
creation of artificial and unnecessary manufacturing industries. How far
such complaints and accusations are well founded I shall not attempt to
decide. It is a complicated polemical question, into which the reader
would probably decline to accompany me. Let us examine rather what
influence the above-mentioned changes have had on the peasantry.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE EMANCIPATED PEASANTRY

The Effects of Liberty--Difficulty of Obtaining Accurate
Information--Pessimist Testimony of the Proprietors--Vague Replies of
the Peasants--My Conclusions in 1877--Necessity of Revising Them--My
Investigations Renewed in 1903--Recent Researches by Native Political
Economists--Peasant Impoverishment Universally Recognised--Various
Explanations Suggested--Demoralisation of the Common People--Peasant
Self-government--Communal System of Land Tenure--Heavy
Taxation--Disruption of Peasant Families--Natural Increase of
Population--