sition
in the industrial world. Fearing no competition, she has proclaimed
the principles of Free Trade, and has inundated the world with her
manufactures--using unscrupulously her powerful navy and all the other
forces at her command for breaking down every barrier tending to check
the flood sent forth from Manchester and Birmingham. In that way her
hungry Proletariat has been fed. But the industrial supremacy of England
is drawing to a close. The nations have discovered the perfidious
fallacy of Free-Trade principles, and are now learning to manufacture
for their own wants, instead of paying England enormous sums to
manufacture for them. Very soon English goods will no longer find
foreign markets, and how will the hungry Proletariat then be fed?
Already the grain production of England is far from sufficient for the
wants of the population, so that, even when the harvest is exceptionally
abundant, enormous quantities of wheat are imported from all quarters
of the globe. Hitherto this grain has been paid for by the manufactured
goods annually exported, but how will it be procured when these goods
are no longer wanted by foreign consumers? And what then will the hungry
Proletariat do?"*

* This passage was written, precisely as it stands, long
before the fiscal question was raised by Mr. Chamberlain.
It will be found in the first edition of this work,
published in 1877. (Vol. I., pp. 179-81.)

This sombre picture of England's future had often been presented to me,
and on nearly every occasion I had been assured that Russia had been
saved from these terrible evils by the rural Commune--an institution
which, in spite of its simplicity and incalculable utility, West
Europeans seemed utterly incapable of understanding and appreciating.

The reader will now easily conceive with what interest I took to
studying this wonderful institution, and with what energy I prosecuted
my researches. An institution which professes to solve satisfactorily
the most difficult social problems of the future is not to be met with
every day, even in Russia, which is specially rich in material for the
student of social science.

On my arrival at Ivanofka my knowledge of the institution was of that
vague, superficial kind which is commonly derived from men who are
fonder of sweeping generalisations and rhetorical declamation than of
serious, patient study of phenomena. I knew that the chief personage in
a Russian village is