Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/606

602. Many peasants have been obliged to mortgage the land which they had in order to purchase more. Some of these will find themselves unable to meet their obligations and will sell or lose that land. This may happen as the result of incompetence, inexperience in the management of private property, poor harvests or other calamities. On the other hand those peasants who are shrewd, thrifty, hardworking, fortunate, will prosper and will add to their dessiatines. The march of time, then, bids fair to divide the rural population of Russia into two classes, the one landless, dependent upon wages for a livelihood, the other made up of small, well-to-do landowners.

This probability, not to say certainty, has raised other voices against the new land policy. These maintain that the increase of a landless class, a proletariate, is always a bad thing. It is not proposed to discuss here the general question of the right of each man to a bit of soil large enough to yield him a livelihood. It need only be pointed out that this ideal can not be realized in Russia. Even if every dessiatine in that vast country were given to the peasants, in much less than a century the holdings would again be too small. Poverty would once more reign over the people. On the other hand it is possible for the proletariate to be self-respecting, intelligent and prosperous. The opportunity for wage-work is not lacking in Russia. There is to-day a demand for laborers on the large estates which can not be satisfied. Great losses are annually sustained by them because there are not hands to gather in the harvest at the proper time. Factories, too, suffer from the lack of operatives who will keep at their tasks the year around. They are too often dependent upon those who leave their farms in the fall to return to them again in the spring. This demand is steadily growing since manufacturing is greatly on the increase.

Certainly the augmentation of the proletariate is not an unmixed good either for those who constitute the class or for society at large. Work is not always to be had for the asking and returns are often inadequate and uncertain. Then, too, there are the dangers inherent in leaving an environment that has exercised a restraint and set up standards and entering another in which one has at first no fixed place and no social responsibility. In time, however, the new environment will become an old one with a conscience and with rulings of its own. Moreover in the long run much good may be expected from separating the individual from the community and obliging him to stand alone. Unsupported by the props to which he is accustomed he will stumble, he may fall, but when he rises it will be with a new strength all his own. And what of the other class whose numbers whether through superior intelligence or industry, fortunate circumstances or a combination of all these are able to add substantially to their lands. Certainly it has not yet come into existence as a body conscious of its solidarity,