but he did not see why these laws, which did not apply in
Russia, must be general. He saw just the same thing in the
socialistic books: either they were the beautiful but
impracticable fantasies which had fascinated him when he was a
student, or they were attempts at improving, rectifying the
economic position in which Europe was placed, with which the
system of land tenure in Russia had nothing in common. Political
economy told him that the laws by which the wealth of Europe had
been developed, and was developing, were universal and unvarying.
Socialism told him that development along these lines leads to
ruin. And neither of them gave an answer, or even a hint, in
reply to the question what he, Levin, and all the Russian
peasants and landowners, were to do with their millions of hands
and millions of acres, to make them as productive as possible for
the common weal.

Having once taken the subject up, he read conscientiously
everything bearing on it, and intended in the autumn to go abroad
to study land systems on the spot, in order that he might not on
this question be confronted with what so often met him on various
subjects. Often, just as he was beginning to understand the idea
in the mind of anyone he was talking to, and was beginning to
explain his own, he would suddenly be told: "But Kauffmann, but
Jones, but Dubois, but Michelli? You haven't read them: they've
thrashed that question out thoroughly."

He saw now distinctly that Kauffmann and Michelli had nothing to
tell him. He knew what he wanted. He saw that Russia has
splendid land, splendid laborers, and that in certain cases, as
at the peasant's on the way to Sviazhsky's, the produce raised by
the laborers and the land is great--in the majority of cases
when capital is applied in the European way the produce is small,
and that this simply arises from the fact that the laborers want
to work and work well only in their own peculiar way, and that
this antagonism is not incidental but invariable, and has its
roots in the national spirit. He thought that the Russian people
whose task it was to colonize and cultivate vast tracts of
unoccupied land, consciously adhered, till all their land was
occupied, to the methods suitable to their purpose, and that
their methods were by no means so bad as was generally supposed.
And he wanted to prove this theoretically in his book and
practically on his land.

Chapter 30

At the end of September the ti