Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/90

 why it is so important for Russia to increase what I have once named the "personal fitness," that is, to improve the "form" of the average working man, which is the foundation of economic efficiency in the whole nation. And you will understand, too, why for the sake of the war it was necessary to prohibit the sale of alcoholic liquors and of what enormous importance that prohibition is for the whole future of a country like Russia. It means the preservation and the elevation of the chief agent in economic life—of man himself.

Once again we find here illustrated that combination of backwardness and ancientness with a certain impulsiveness and freshness, to which I referred in my first lecture. Without the heroic effort that was implied in the full and decisive renunciation of alcoholic liquors, which proceeded from the moral will of the whole nation, Russia could not have overcome her backwardness, that low level of the individuals who make up the mass of the nation which is our historical heritage. The progressive and collective impulse embodied in the command of the State overcame the backwardness and inertness of a multitude of weak individuals.

And in this connection I should like to touch on the tremendous revolution in the sphere of agrarian structure, which took place in Russia after the political revolution of 1904–1905. Allow me once again to speak of contemporary life as a historian. When in my lectures on economic history I speak to my students of so-called enclosures in England, a fact and a process of which you have of course a far better knowledge