Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/160



EVASTOPOL ushered in the epoch of the "great reforms," for the reforms of 1861 and their consequences were thus named. Constitutional government was not introduced, but the peasants were liberated and the administration had to be reformed. Similarly in Austria, the year 1848 heralded the liberation of the peasantry, but the constitution then inaugurated was ephemeral. Similarly after the battle of Jena, Prussia remodelled her administration, but a constitution was not granted until much later.

The majority of the population had in fact hitherto lived as slaves, for the tying of the peasant to the lord's soil, completed under Catherine, was practical slavery.

It is difficult to-day to realise even approximately the nature of Russian serfdom. Those familiar with the history of the institution are apt to confine their attention to its legal and economic aspects. It is necessary to grasp the moral and social implications of serfdom as it affected concrete life. We have to understand that the peasant was in actual fact another's property, soul and body; that the lord could sell his serfs; that down to the year 1833 he could at will break up the serf's family as irrevocably as death breaks it up, by selling an individual member apart from the family—for the serf, bound to the soil, could not follow the one who was sold, as the wives of aristocrats were able at their own charges to follow husbands exiled to Siberia. The sert was money, was part of the natural economy. The landowner could gamble away his "souls" at the card-table, or could make his mistresses a present of them. The slaves were at the