selves
as the most valuable troops which the Tsar possesses, believing
themselves capable of performing anything within the bounds of human
possibility, and a good deal that lies beyond that limit. More than once
Don Cossacks have assured me that if the Tsar had allowed them to fit
out a flotilla of small boats during the Crimean War they would have
captured the British fleet, as their ancestors used to capture Turkish
galleys on the Black Sea!

In old times, throughout the whole territory of the Don Cossacks,
agriculture was prohibited on pain of death. It is generally supposed
that this measure was adopted with a view to preserve the martial
spirit of the inhabitants, but it may be explained otherwise. The great
majority of the Cossacks, averse to all regular, laborious occupations,
wished to live by fishing, hunting, cattle-breeding, and marauding,
but there was always amongst them a considerable number of
immigrants--runaway serfs from the interior--who had been accustomed to
live by agriculture. These latter wished to raise crops on the fertile
virgin soil, and if they had been allowed to do so they would to some
extent have spoiled the pastures. We have here, I believe, the true
reason for the above-mentioned prohibition, and this view is strongly
confirmed by analogous facts which I have observed in another locality.
In the Kirghiz territory the poorer inhabitants of the aouls near the
frontier, having few or no cattle, wish to let part of the common land
to the neighbouring Russian peasantry for agricultural purposes; but
the richer inhabitants, who possess flocks and herds, strenuously oppose
this movement, and would doubtless prohibit it under pain of death if
they had the power, because all agricultural encroachments diminish the
pasture-land.

Whatever was the real reason of the prohibition, practical necessity
proved in the long run too strong for the anti-agriculturists. As the
population augmented and the opportunities for marauding decreased, the
majority had to overcome their repugnance to husbandry; and soon large
patches of ploughed land or waving grain were to be seen in the vicinity
of the stanitsas, as the Cossack villages are termed. At first there was
no attempt to regulate this new use of the ager publicus. Each Cossack
who wished to raise a crop ploughed and sowed wherever he thought fit,
and retained as long as he chose the land thus appropriated; and when
the soil began to show signs of exh