hen they saw the Russian peasants on their borders
laboriously ploughing and reaping, they looked on them with compassion,
and never thought of following their example. But an impersonal
legislator came to them--a very severe and tyrannical legislator,
who would not brook disobedience--I mean Economic Necessity. By
the encroachments of the Ural Cossacks on the east, and by the
ever-advancing wave of Russian colonisation from the north and west,
their territory had been greatly diminished. With diminution of the
pasturage came diminution of the live stock, their sole means of
subsistence. In spite of their passively conservative spirit they had to
look about for some new means of obtaining food and clothing--some new
mode of life requiring less extensive territorial possessions. It was
only then that they began to think of imitating their neighbours. They
saw that the neighbouring Russian peasant lived comfortably on thirty or
forty acres of land, whilst they possessed a hundred and fifty acres per
male, and were in danger of starvation.

The conclusion to be drawn from this was self-evident--they ought
at once to begin ploughing and sowing. But there was a very serious
obstacle to the putting of this principle in practice. Agriculture
certainly requires less land than sheep-farming, but it requires very
much more labour, and to hard work the Bashkirs were not accustomed.
They could bear hardships and fatigues in the shape of long journeys
on horseback, but the severe, monotonous labour of the plough and the
sickle was not to their taste. At first, therefore, they adopted a
compromise. They had a portion of their land tilled by Russian peasants,
and ceded to these a part of the produce in return for the labour
expended; in other words, they assumed the position of landed
proprietors, and farmed part of their land on the metayage system.

The process of transition had reached this point in several aouls which
I visited. My friend Mehemet Zian showed me at some distance from the
tents his plot of arable land, and introduced me to the peasant who
tilled it--a Little-Russian, who assured me that the arrangement
satisfied all parties. The process of transition cannot, however, stop
here. The compromise is merely a temporary expedient. Virgin soil gives
very abundant harvests, sufficient to support both the labourer and the
indolent proprietor, but after a few years the soil becomes exhausted
and gives only a very moderate re