HOPE FOR THE RUSSIAN PEASANTRY 603 



able as a whole to work definitely toward chosen ends. Time and ex- 

 perience and education are necessary for that. But individual well-to- 

 do mujik families grow steadily more numerous. I remember in par- 

 ticular one such in the province of Samara. Its past, its present, its 

 future were, so to speak, plainly in view. I drove up the hillside through 

 fields of golden grain, past the tiny orchard not yet old enough to bear 

 fruit, to the brand-new home, each one of the four good-sized rooms 

 fully furnished and so orderly and immaculate as to show conclusively 

 that they were not being used. Scarcely ten feet back stood an old izba 

 bearing every evidence that the family lived its life there. The back 

 part of the stove and a low platform served as beds. Sheep-skin coats 

 and long felt boots lay heaped in one corner. Hens walked placidly in 

 and out of the door and the horses and cattle were stabled only a few 

 feet away. Our host displayed his possessions with the greatest pride 

 and pointing significantly* to a field adjoining his own said, "It will 

 soon be mine. I am buying it." It is probable that this man will not 

 be content to have his children attend only the parish school. Some one 

 of them may be sent away if only to study how better to till the soil and 

 make it yield larger profits. Here is the new agricultural Eussia from 

 which great things may be hoped. These well-to-do farmers, sobered 

 by the possession of property, no longer obliged to labor for bread to the 

 exclusion of everything else, able to educate their children, will rapidly 

 rise to the position of a powerful middle class to whose united voice 

 even autocracy will listen. If this class is able to preserve the remem- 

 brance of its kinship with the poor, if it deals as justly with all strata 

 of society as the communes from which it has sprung sought to deal in 

 the distribution of their land the future of Eussia is assured. 



