Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/596

 not uncommon in Russia to-day and are true to the past in nearly every detail. The Russian peasant accepts with scarcely a murmur what he believes can not be changed. He is not likely even to question circumstances if he has bread enough.

And during the period immediately following the emancipation it would seem that there was for the most part bread enough. There were hungry years even then, when the crops were poor or failed altogether, but they were taken as a matter of course. No one was held to blame. The peasants complained, it is true, at the necessity of paying for the land which they firmly believed had always been theirs, but the pressure of poverty was not yet such as to drive them to seek a remedy.

Time, however, brought changes. Sons and daughters grew up and married. Whether they remained in the home of their parents or built izbas for themselves land must be provided for them. How else could they live? But new units could be created only by dividing the fields anew and every parcel was thereby made smaller. Now and then, indeed, the community leased private land, but the rent was a difficult problem. Occasionally, also, alas! it was obliged to lease out some of its own land for money paid in advance and imperatively needed for the annual dues. Ordinarily this was a tract worked in common, not parcelled out into lots, but its alienation decreased none the less the food supply of the village. Thus the time came when the nadiel did not yield enough to support those who cultivated it. They were obliged to eke out a livelihood by earning money during the winter. Sometimes a whole village made nails, or carved wooden spoons or painted icons. Often the men sought work away from home. Some of them wandered from place to place, accepting any employment that offered itself, living most meagerly, saving every kopec and bringing back with them in the spring perhaps forty rubles apiece, little more than twenty dollars. Some went to the city and became cab-drivers, household servants of one kind or another, porters in railway stations. It often happened that all the men of one village who left home to earn money went to the same city and engaged in the same employment. Those whose services were not required to cultivate the land apportioned to their families frequently stayed throughout the year, sending their earnings back to help pay the dues to the state, comforting themselves in their exile with the thought that in old age they could return to the land and depend upon it for a livelihood. To return to it and share its fruits was certainly their privilege. Every mujik family recognizes the right of its own to come back, but the amount to be shared grew ever smaller.

As the years passed and the Russian peasantry increased in numbers by leap and bounds, doubling itself in less than half a century, its lot became constantly worse. The loaf scarcely large enough for four is scanty food for eight. Small wonder that very many of the communities were quite unable to make their annual payments to the state. Others