but it
cannot be shirked. However sceptical we may be with regard to social
panaceas of all sorts, we cannot dismiss with a few hackneyed phrases a
gigantic experiment in social science involving the material and moral
welfare of many millions of human beings. On the other hand, I do not
wish to exhaust the reader's patience by a long series of multifarious
details and conflicting arguments. What I propose to do, therefore, is
to state in a few words the conclusions at which I have arrived, after a
careful study of the question in all its bearings, and to indicate in a
general way how I have arrived at these conclusions.

If Russia were content to remain a purely agricultural country of
the Sleepy Hollow type, and if her Government were to devote all its
energies to maintaining economic and social stagnation, the rural
Commune might perhaps prevent the formation of a large Proletariat in
the future, as it has tended to prevent it for centuries in the past.
The periodical redistributions of the Communal land would secure to
every family a portion of the soil, and when the population became too
dense, the evils arising from inordinate subdivision of the land
might be obviated by a carefully regulated system of emigration to
the outlying, thinly populated provinces. All this sounds very well
in theory, but experience is proving that it cannot be carried out in
practice. In Russia, as in Western Europe, the struggle for life, even
among the conservative agricultural classes, is becoming yearly more
and more intense, and is producing both the desire and the necessity for
greater freedom of individual character and effort, so that each man may
make his way in the world according to the amount of his intelligence,
energy, spirit of enterprise, and tenacity of purpose. Whatever
institutions tend to fetter the individual and maintain a dead level
of mediocrity have little chance of subsisting for any great length of
time, and it must be admitted that among such institutions the rural
Commune in its present form occupies a prominent place. All its members
must possess, in principle if not always in practice, an equal share of
the soil and must practice the same methods of agriculture, and when a
certain inequality has been created by individual effort it is in great
measure wiped out by a redistribution of the Communal land.

Now, I am well aware that in practice the injustice and inconveniences
of the system, being always tempe