Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 edition. Excerpt: ... THE RUSSIAN AGRARIAN QUESTION. CHAPTER I. In all European countries the agrarian question is of great moment, but in none does it possess the same interest and importance as in Russia. Here the agricultural class constitutes eighty-two per cent. of the entire population--equal for European Russia, exclusive of Finland and Poland, to about sixty-three million souls. Ireland alone, with seventy-three per cent. of her population engaged in husbandry, approaches at some distance this figure. Russia is, and most undoubtedly for many years remain, a peasant State in the fullest acceptation of the term. With us, therefore, the agrarian question is the national question, and agrarian concerns are national concerns, all others being dependent on and subservient to them. The tillers of the soil--our moujiks--must of necessity become the chief figures in our social and political life. On the monjik rests the financial, military, and political power of the State, as well as its interior cohesion and prosperity. The inclinations, ideals, and aspirations of the moujiks will also play the principal part in the remoulding of Russia's future. For all interested in polities--statesmen and administrators, writers and scholars--the moujik must be the prime object of study, observation, and investigation, as well as of practical manipulation. For the same reasons the Russian moujik has always attracted the attention of observant travellers who have desired to make known to English-speaking readers the agrarian conditions of this strange country, of which so much is said and so little known. There are few among educated foreigners who have not heard of the self-governing, semirepublican tnir and the somewhat communistic Russian system of land tenure, with its...