ater
advantages, and was attended with much fewer inconveniences, than
people generally supposed. But they did not confine themselves to these
immediate practical advantages, which had very little interest for
the general reader. The writers in The Contemporary explained that the
importance of the rural Commune lies, not in its actual condition, but
in its capabilities of development, and they drew, with prophetic eye,
most attractive pictures of the happy rural Commune of the future. Let
me give here, as an illustration, one of these prophetic descriptions:

"Thanks to the spread of primary and technical education the peasants
have become well acquainted with the science of agriculture, and are
always ready to undertake in common the necessary improvements. They no
longer exhaust the soil by exporting the grain, but sell merely certain
technical products containing no mineral ingredients. For this purpose
the Communes possess distilleries, starch-works, and the like, and the
soil thereby retains its original fertility. The scarcity induced by the
natural increase of the population is counteracted by improved methods
of cultivation. If the Chinese, who know nothing of natural science,
have succeeded by purely empirical methods in perfecting agriculture to
such an extent that a whole family can support itself on a few square
yards of land, what may not the European do with the help of chemistry,
botanical physiology, and the other natural sciences?"

Coming back from the possibilities of the future to the actualities of
the present, these ingenious and eloquent writers pointed out that
in the rural Commune, Russia possessed a sure preventive against the
greatest evil of West-European social organisation, the Proletariat.
Here the Slavophils could strike in with their favourite refrain about
the rotten social condition of Western Europe; and their temporary
allies, though they habitually scoffed at the Slavophil jeremiads, had
no reason for the moment to contradict them. Very soon the Proletariat
became, for the educated classes, a species of bugbear, and the reading
public were converted to the doctrine that the Communal institutions
should be preserved as a means of excluding the monster from Russia.

This fear of what is vaguely termed the Proletariat is still frequently
to be met with in Russia, and I have often taken pains to discover
precisely what is meant by the term. I cannot, however, say that my
efforts have