Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/607

Rh able as a whole to work definitely toward chosen ends. Time and experience and education are necessary for that. But individual well-to-do mujik families grow steadily more numerous. I remember in particular one such in the province of Samara. Its past, its present, its future were, so to speak, plainly in view. I drove up the hillside through fields of golden grain, past the tiny orchard not yet old enough to bear fruit, to the brand-new home, each one of the four good-sized rooms fully furnished and so orderly and immaculate as to show conclusively that they were not being used. Scarcely ten feet back stood an old izba bearing every evidence that the family lived its life there. The back part of the stove and a low platform served as beds. Sheep-skin coats and long felt boots lay heaped in one corner. Hens walked placidly in and out of the door and the horses and cattle were stabled only a few feet away. Our host displayed his possessions with the greatest pride and pointing significantly* to a field adjoining his own said, "It will soon be mine. I am buying it." It is probable that this man will not be content to have his children attend only the parish school. Some one of them may be sent away if only to study how better to till the soil and make it yield larger profits. Here is the new agricultural Russia from which great things may be hoped. These well-to-do farmers, sobered by the possession of property, no longer obliged to labor for bread to the exclusion of everything else, able to educate their children, will rapidly rise to the position of a powerful middle class to whose united voice even autocracy will listen. If this class is able to preserve the remembrance of its kinship with the poor, if it deals as justly with all strata of society as the communes from which it has sprung sought to deal in the distribution of their land the future of Russia is assured.