6o2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



crease. Many peasants have been obliged to mortgage the land which 

 they had in order to purchase more. Some of these will find themselves 

 unable to meet their obligations and will sell or lose that land. This 

 may happen as the result of incompetence, inexperience in the manage- 

 ment of private property, poor harvests or other calamities. On the 

 other hand those peasants who are shrewd, thrifty, hardworking, fortu- 

 nate, will prosper and will add to their dessiatines. The march of time, 

 then, bids fair to divide the rural population of Eussia into two classes, 

 the one landless, dependent upon wages for a livelihood, the other made 

 up of small, well-to-do landowners. 



This probability, not to say certainty, has raised other voices against 

 the new land policy. These maintain that the increase of a landless 

 class, a proletariate, is always a bad thing. It is not proposed to dis- 

 cuss here the general question of the right of each man to a bit of soil 

 large enough to yield him a livelihood. It need only be pointed out 

 that this ideal can not be realized in Eussia. Even if every dessiatine 

 in that vast country were given to the peasants, in much less than a 

 century the holdings would again be too small. Poverty would once 

 more reign over the people. On the other hand it is possible for the 

 proletariate to be self-respecting, intelligent and prosperous. The op- 

 portunity for wage-work is not lacking in Eussia. There is to-day a 

 demand for laborers on the large estates which can not be satisfied. 

 Great losses are annually sustained by them because there are not 

 hands to gather in the harvest at the proper time. Factories, too, suffer 

 from the lack of operatives who will keep at their tasks the year around. 

 They are too often dependent upon those who leave their farms in the 

 fall to return to them again in the spring. This demand is steadily 

 growing since manufacturing is greatly on the increase. 



Certainly the augmentation of the proletariate is not an unmixed 

 good either for those who constitute the class or for society at large. 

 Work is not always to be had for the asking and returns are often inade- 

 quate and uncertain. Then, too, there are the dangers inherent in leav- 

 ing an environment that has exercised a restraint and set up standards 

 and entering another in which one has at first no fixed place and no 

 social responsibility. In time, however, the new environment will be- 

 come an old one with a conscience and with rulings of its own. More- 

 over in the long run much good may be expected from separating the 

 individual from the community and obliging him to stand alone. Un- 

 supported by the props to which he is accustomed he will stumble, he 

 may fall, but when he rises it will be with a new strength all his own. 

 And what of the other class whose numbers whether through su- 

 perior intelligence or industry, fortunate circumstances or a combina- 

 tion of all these are able to add substantially to their lands. Certainly 

 it has not yet come into existence as a body conscious of its solidarity, 



