Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/218

 conveniences of trade, mills, railways, and buying agents encouraged to trade, and brought it about that wheat was wholly sold by autumn.

If during the last years, when wheat had reached an especially low price, certain venders began to lay in a store of grain, waiting for a price, then this storage was so difficult that, as soon as the prices advanced at the beginning of the spring of this year, and reached fifty and sixty kopeks a pud, then all the grain was sold and cleaned out, and nothing remained of the provisions of previous years. In 1840 not only had the proprietors and tradesmen plenty of provisions, but everywhere among the muzhiks were from three to five years' stores of old grain. Now this custom has gone by, and there is nothing like it anywhere. In this consists the third consideration: that grain this year will not be sufficient.

But not only is there a probability of this, but there are also symptoms, and sufficiently definite symptoms, that this lack exists.

One of these symptoms is the every day more and more frequently repeated phenomenon that there is no bread on sale in the depths of the famine-stricken localities, as in that in which I am now—in the Dankovsky District, there is ''no rye on sale. The muzhiks cannot get flour.''

Yesterday I saw two muzhiks of the Dankovsky District, who had been driving around a radius well known to them, of twenty versts, to all the mills and shops, to buy for money two puds of flour, and they could not find it. One begged for some at the dépôt of another district; the other obtained some.

And this phenomenon is not exceptional; it is constantly repeated, and everywhere. Millers come to ask for Christ's sake—Khrista radi—to let them have flour at the zemstvo dépôts, because they have no flour, and cannot get any. Of tradesmen in the cities, of the railway, it may be bought in bulk, at least a half a carload or a carload; but at retail there is none to be had. The great merchants who have a supply will not sell at all, they are waiting; the small tradesmen, storekeepers,