Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/600

596 a scientific way. These were comparatively few in number. It must be confessed, then, that the ukase of November, 1906, did not in itself provide a salvation for the economic difficulties of the people.

A solution was, however, bound up in a way with the working out of the law. Its execution lay with the provincial and district commissions created in 1906 primarily to assist the Peasants' Bank in smoothing the way for those who wished to purchase land. Now the bank had been definitely instructed to sell its land as far as possible in well-rounded pieces which in the hands of individual owners might serve as models to the neighboring communities. The commissions were therefore, while assisting the bank, engaged in the creation of compact farms. Their other activities were along this same line. They were instructed by the government to do everything in their power to persuade the peasants to give up irrational methods of cultivation, particularly the division of the fields into minute parcels.

The ukase of 1906 gave these commissions a great opportunity. The law did not state that every peasant who wished to withdraw from the community and receive his share of land in perpetuity must be given that land in a single piece but it permitted and even encouraged this procedure and it was quite natural that the commissions should have striven toward this end in the surveys which they were called upon to make. During the five years from 1907 to 1911 inclusive 503,408 families withdrawing from the community received their land, through the agency of the government surveys, in compact units. This was certainly not a large number, considering the population of Russia—but it was a decided step in the direction of agricultural progress.

The ukase of November, 1906, then, although primarily political in its spirit and purpose, resulted in a certain limited economic good. From the very beginning there were some who defended this effort to transform community into private property on the ground that it paved the way for scientific farming. Gradually the emphasis shifted from the question of tenure to the question of husbandry. It was plain to those who studied the subject that the diminution of crops in Russia was due to obsolete and wasteful methods of cultivating the soil. There were whole areas that were exhausted, there were fields that lay so far away from the village that owned them that they could not be tilled, the weed-grown furrows which served as boundary lines between the parcels aggregated a vast territory lost to cultivation. The essential thing was to map out the land anew so that it could be worked in larger tracts and with better methods.

It might have been possible, as some contend, to legislate toward this end without disturbing the mir. The separate parcels could have been consolidated into large areas and still have remained communal property. This was done by some villages in central Russia during the