ation. But here again it simply
reflects public opinion and certain intellectual peculiarities of the
educated classes. When a Russian begins to write on a simple everyday
subject, he likes to connect it with general principles, philosophy,
or history, and begins, perhaps, by expounding his views on the
intellectual and social developments of humanity in general and of
Russia in particular. If he has sufficient space at his disposal he
may even tell you something about the early period of Russian history
previous to the Mongol invasion before he gets to the simple matter in
hand. In a previous chapter I have described the process of "shedding
on a subject the light of science" in Imperial legislation.* In Zemstvo
activity we often meet with pedantry of a similar kind.

* Vide supra, p. 343.

If this pedantry were confined to the writing of Reports it might not do
much harm. Unfortunately, it often appears in the sphere of action.
To illustrate this I take a recent instance from the province of
Nizhni-Novgorod. The Zemstvo of that province received from the Central
Government in 1895 a certain amount of capital for road-improvement,
with instructions from the Ministry of Interior that it should classify
the roads according to their relative importance and improve them
accordingly. Any intelligent person well acquainted with the region
might have made, in the course of a week or two, the required
classification accurately enough for all practical purposes. Instead of
adopting this simple procedure, what does the Zemstvo do? It chooses one
of the eleven districts of which the province is composed and instructs
its statistical department to describe all the villages with a view of
determining the amount of traffic which each will probably contribute to
the general movement, and then it verifies its a priori conclusions by
means of a detachment of specially selected "registrars," posted at all
the crossways during six days of each month. These registrars doubtless
inscribed every peasant cart as it passed and made a rough estimate of
the weight of its load. When this complicated and expensive procedure
was completed for one district it was applied to another; but at the end
of three years, before all the villages of this second district had
been described and the traffic estimated, the energy of the statistical
department seems to have flagged, and, like a young author impatient to
see himself in print, it published a