596 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



a scientific way. These were comparatively few in number. It must 

 be confessed, then, that the ukase of November, 1906, did not in itself 

 provide a salvation for the economic difficulties of the people. 



A solution was, however, bound up in a way with the working out of 

 the law. Its execution lay with the provincial and district commissions 

 created in 1906 primarily to assist the Peasants' Bank in smoothing the 

 way for those who wished to purchase land. Now the bank had been 

 definitely instructed to sell its land as far as possible in well-rounded 

 pieces which in the hands of individual owners might serve as models to 

 the neighboring communities. The commissions were therefore, while 

 assisting the bank, engaged in the creation of compact farms. Their 

 other activities were along this same line. They were instructed by the 

 government to do everything in their power to persuade the peasants 

 to give up irrational methods of cultivation, particularly the division 

 of the fields into minute parcels. 



The ukase of 1906 gave these commissions a great opportunity. The 

 law did not state that every peasant who wished to withdraw from the 

 community and receive his share of land in perpetuity must be given 

 that land in a single piece but it permitted and even encouraged this 

 procedure and it was quite natural that the commissions should have 

 striven toward this end in the surveys which they were called upon to 

 make. During the five years from 1907 to 1911 inclusive 503,408 

 families withdrawing from the community received their land, through 

 the agency of the government surveys, in compact units. This was 

 certainly not a large number, considering the population of Russia — but 

 it was a decided step in the direction of agricultural progress. 



The ukase of November, 1906, then, although primarily political in 

 its spirit and purpose, resulted in a certain limited economic good. 

 From the very beginning there were some who defended this effort to 

 transform community into private property on the ground that it paved 

 the way for scientific farming. Gradually the emphasis shifted from the 

 question of tenure to the question of husbandry. It was plain to those 

 who studied the subject that the diminution of crops in Russia was due 

 to obsolete and wasteful methods of cultivating the soil. There were 

 whole areas that were exhausted, there were fields that lay so far away 

 from the village that owned them that they could not be tilled, the 

 weed-grown furrows which served as boundary lines between the parcels 

 aggregated a vast territory lost to cultivation. The essential thing 

 was to map out the land anew so that it could be worked in larger 

 tracts and with better methods. 



It might have been possible, as some contend, to legislate toward 

 this end without disturbing the mir. The separate parcels could have 

 been consolidated into large areas and still have remained communal 

 property. This was done by some villages in central Russia during the 



