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 CHAPTER VI

had won a brilliant victory at the session of the Commission of August 29, but the consequences of his victory were injurious to him. The new committee appointed to study the situation of the foreign population had been constituted and had gone to its field of action with a promptness and energy surprising to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch; at the end of three months it presented its report.

The condition of this population had been studied from a political, administrative, economical, ethnographical, material, and religious point of view. Each question was followed by an admirably concise reply, leaving no room to doubt that these answers were the work, not of a human mind, always liable to mistake, but of an experienced bureaucracy. These answers were based on official data, such as the reports of governors and archbishops, based again on the reports of heads of districts and ecclesiastical superintendents, in their turn based on the reports from communal administrations and country priests. And therefore their correctness could not be doubted. Questions such as these, "Why are the harvests poor?" and, "Why do the inhabitants of certain localities persist in their beliefs?" and the like—questions which without the help of the official machine could never be solved, and to which ages would not have found a reply—were clearly solved, in conformity with the opinions of Alekseï Aleksandrovitch.

But Stremof, feeling that he had been touched to the quick at the last session, had employed for the reception of the committee's report a stratagem unexpected by Alekseï Aleksandrovitch. Taking with him several other members, he suddenly went over to Karenin's side, and, not satisfied with warmly supporting the measures proposed by Alekseï Aleksandrovitch, he proposed others, of the same nature. These measures, which were of such a radical nature as to be entirely opposed to Alekseï Aleksandrovitch's intention, were