he
financial administration, we can hardly believe that the peasantry did
not in some measure contribute to it. In any case, it is very difficult,
if not impossible, for them, under actual conditions, to improve their
economic position. On that point all Russian economists are agreed.
One of the most competent and sober-minded of them, M. Schwanebach,
calculates that the head of a peasant household, after deducting
the grain required to feed his family, has to pay into the Imperial
Treasury, according to the district in which he resides, from 25 to 100
per cent, of his agricultural revenue. If that ingenious calculation
is even approximately correct, we must conclude that further financial
reforms are urgently required, especially in those provinces where the
population live exclusively by agriculture.

Heavy as the burden of taxation undoubtedly is, it might perhaps be
borne without very serious inconvenience if the peasant families could
utilise productively all their time and strength. Unfortunately in the
existing economic organisation a great deal of their time and energy is
necessarily wasted. Their economic life was radically dislocated by
the Emancipation, and they have not yet succeeded in reorganising it
according to the new conditions.

In the time of serfage an estate formed, from the economic point of
view, a co-operative agricultural association, under a manager who
possessed unlimited authority, and sometimes abused it, but who was
generally worldly-wise enough to understand that the prosperity of the
whole required the prosperity of the component parts. By the abolition
of serfage the association was dissolved and liquidated, and the strong,
compact whole fell into a heap of independent units, with separate and
often mutually hostile interests. Some of the disadvantages of this
change for the peasantry I have already enumerated above. The most
important I have now to mention. In virtue of the Emancipation Law each
family received an amount of land which tempted it to continue farming
on its own account, but which did not enable it to earn a living and
pay its rates and taxes. The peasant thus became a kind of amphibious
creature--half farmer and half something else--cultivating his allotment
for a portion of his daily bread, and obliged to have some other
occupation wherewith to cover the inevitable deficit in his domestic
budget. If he was fortunate enough to find near his home a bit of land
to be let