urplus. If the peasantry have been on short rations, it
is not because the quantity of food produced has fallen short of the
requirements of the population, but because it has been unequally
distributed. The truth is that the large landed proprietors produce more
and the peasants less than they consume, and it has naturally occurred
to many people that the present state of things might be improved if
a portion of the arable land passed, without any socialistic,
revolutionary measures, from the one class to the other. This operation
began spontaneously soon after the Emancipation. Well-to-do peasants who
had saved a little money bought from the proprietors bits of land near
their villages and cultivated them in addition to their allotments. At
first this extension of peasant land was confined within very narrow
limits, because the peasants had very little capital at their disposal,
but in 1882 the Government came to their aid by creating the Peasant
Land Bank, the object of which was to advance money to purchasers of the
peasant class on the security of the land purchased, at the rate of 7
1/2 per cent., including sinking fund.* From that moment the purchases
increased rapidly. They were made by individual peasants, by rural
Communes, and, most of all, by small voluntary associations composed of
three, four, or more members. In the course of twenty years (1883-1903)
the Bank made 47,791 advances, and in this way were purchased about
eighteen million acres. This sounds a very big acquisition, but it will
not do much to relieve the pressure on the peasantry as a whole, because
it adds only about 6 per cent. to the amount they already possessed in
virtue of the Emancipation Law.

* This arrangement extinguishes the debt in 34 1/2 years; an
additional 1 per cent, extinguishes it in 24 1/2 years. By
recent legislation other arrangements are permitted.

Nearly all of this land purchased by the peasantry comes directly or
indirectly from the Noblesse, and much more will doubtless pass from
the one class to the other if the Government continues to encourage the
operation; but already symptoms of a change of policy are apparent. In
the higher official regions it is whispered that the existing policy is
objectionable from the political point of view, and one sometimes hears
the question asked: Is it right and desirable that the Noblesse, who
have ever done their duty in serving faithfully the Tsar and Fatherland,