the French-speaking nobles in West-European
costume; the burly, bearded merchant in black cloth cap and long, shiny,
double-breasted coat; the priest with his uncut hair and flowing robes;
the peasant with his full, fair beard and unsavoury, greasy sheepskin.
Meeting everywhere those well-marked types, he naturally assumes
that Russian society is composed of exclusive castes; and this first
impression will be fully confirmed by a glance at the Code. On examining
that monumental work, he finds that an entire volume--and by no means
the smallest--is devoted to the rights and obligations of the various
classes. From this he concludes that the classes have a legal as well as
an actual existence. To make assurance doubly sure he turns to official
statistics, and there he finds the following table:

Hereditary nobles........652,887
Personal nobles..........374,367
Clerical classes.........695,905
Town classes...........7,196,005
Rural classes.........63,840,291
Military classes.......4,767,703
Foreigners...............153,185
---------- 77,680,293*

* Livron: "Statistitcheskoe Obozrenie Rossiiskoi Imperii,"
St. Petersburg, 1875. The above figures include the whole
Empire. The figures according to the latest census (1897)
are not yet available.

Armed with these materials, the traveller goes to his Russian friends
who have assured him that their country knows nothing of class
distinctions. He is confident of being able to convince them that
they have been labouring under a strange delusion, but he will be
disappointed. They will tell him that these laws and statistics
prove nothing, and that the categories therein mentioned are mere
administrative fictions.

This apparent contradiction is to be explained by the equivocal meaning
of the Russian terms Sosloviya and Sostoyaniya, which are commonly
translated "social classes." If by these terms are meant "castes" in
the Oriental sense, then it may be confidently asserted that such do not
exist in Russia. Between the nobles, the clergy, the burghers, and the
peasants there are no distinctions of race and no impassable barriers.
The peasant often becomes a merchant, and there are many cases on record
of peasants and sons of parish priests becoming nobles. Until very
recently the parish clergy composed, as we have seen, a peculiar and
exclusive class, with many of the characteristics of a cast