RUSSIA. 



GENERAI. OUTLINE OF THE NEW RUSSIAN LAND REFORMS. 



{Continued) (i). 



§ 3. Readjustment of nadiei, land as singi^e housings. 



Our readers know from what we have said in the first part of this 

 article, that when the land commissions began working in accordance 

 with the provisions of the law mentioned in it, in Russia properly so called 

 people were almost ignorant in respect to the measures to be taken on the 

 large scale required for the scientific redistribution of the land in single 

 separate holdings for each peasant family. The position was better, in 

 this respect, in Poland (General Government of Warsaw) and better still 

 in the Baltic Provinces, where the peasants, for well known historical and 

 ethical reasons (North German influence), already for the most part pos- 

 sessed holdings well rounded oft (2). 



The newly instituted land commissions then, at the beginning of the 

 reforms, found they had virgin soil to work on, but the fact that in certain 

 localities undertakings of this kind were already understood among the 

 population had, undoubtedly, a certain moral importance, especially as it 

 was bound to contribute to extinguish the peasants' distrust of the innov- 

 ation (3) to be carried out. Otherwise, this distrust might easily have assumed 

 fantastic proportions, as was the case in the Eastern Governments, where 



(i) See the liist part of this article in the Bulletin of Economic and Social Intelligence, 

 Novemljer, 1913. pp. 119-134. 



(2) A. A. KoEFOED gives in his often quoted work (1905), " Einzelsiedelun.;en auf dem NadieJ- 

 lande " (Peasant Holdings on Nndiel I<and), two good maps showing the areas readjusted in 

 Poland, in the Baltic Provinces and in Russia. 



(3) See Ordinsky: Etat des riformes a<iraires in the Sidskoe Khoziaistvo, St. "Petersburg, I9i'.>. 

 This hostile attitude towards all that is unknown seems inborn in all peasants, as it was in the 

 nattu-al man. It is enough to remember that the best known Danish economist of the t 8th- 

 century speaking of similar proposed land reforms in Denmark, wrote " that it would be easier 

 to induce the peasants to change their religion than to make them adopt a new systeia of 

 oiltivating potatoes." 



