the decrease in the quantity of live
stock. According to the very imperfect statistics available, for every
hundred inhabitants the number of horses has decreased from 26 to 17,
the number of cattle from 36 to 25, and the number of sheep from 73 to
40. This is a serious matter, because it means that the land is not
so well manured and cultivated as formerly, and is consequently not so
productive. Several economists have attempted to fix precisely to what
extent the productivity has decreased, but I confess I have little faith
in the accuracy of their conclusions. M. Polenof, for example, a most
able and conscientious investigator, calculates that between 1861 and
1895, all over Russia, the amount of food produced, in relation to the
number of the population, has decreased by seven per cent. His methods
of calculation are ingenious, but the statistical data with which he
operates are so far from accurate that his conclusions on this point
have, in my opinion, little or no scientific value. With all due
deference to Russian economists, I may say parenthetically that they are
very found of juggling with carelessly collected statistics, as if their
data were mathematical quantities.

Several of the Zemstvos have grappled with this question of peasant
impoverishment, and the data which they have collected make a very
doleful impression. In the province of Moscow, for example, a careful
investigation gave the following results: Forty per cent. of the
peasant households had no longer any horses, 15 per cent. had given up
agriculture altogether, and about 10 per cent. had no longer any
land. We must not, however, assume, as is often done, that the peasant
families who have no live stock and no longer till the land are utterly
ruined. In reality many of them are better off than their neighbours who
appear as prosperous in the official statistics, having found profitable
occupation in the home industries, in the towns, in the factories, or on
the estates of the landed proprietors. It must be remembered that Moscow
is the centre of one of the regions in which manufacturing industry has
progressed with gigantic strides during the last half-century, and it
would be strange indeed if, in such a region, the peasantry who supply
the labour to the towns and factories remained thriving agriculturists.
That many Russians are surprised and horrified at the actual state of
things shows to what an extent the educated classes are still under