GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE NEW RUSSL\N LAND REFORMS I33 



the peasants believed that the smveyors and agricultural engineers trav- 

 elling through the country were Government commissioners charged to 

 take the peasants' land and give it to France, as France had assisted Russia 

 in the war with Japan, On the ether hand, it sufficed for two rural communes 

 of a district of more or less area to adopt the new reform for the interest 

 of the adjacent communes to be at once awakened, and for thousands on 

 thousands of appUcations for readjustment to flow in from the districts 

 and provinces to the land commissions. 



To encourage the movement in favour of reform, the land commiss- 

 ions made very adroit use, especially at first, of the intervention of the 

 Peasants' Land Bank, the powers of which had been increased for the pur- 

 pose : the Bank had been granted power to buy landed estates for its own 

 account and sell them again to the peasants in lots. Previously, sales ol 

 this kind were generally made before division to communities (peasants' 

 associations or rural communes), which themselves undertook to divide 

 the land among their members, according to the system described at 

 the end of the preceding part of this article. By the new arrange- 

 ment, the Bank, on the other hand, sold the land, as far as possible in 

 single lots to individual peasants, whose farrns gradually became models 

 for their neighbours in the various Governments. The advantages of the 

 new system of distribution were so evident, even to the most ignorant 

 peasant, that the example was soon followed and a large number of rural 

 communes decided to urge the land commissions to readjust their farins 

 and improve the system of farming the nadiel land. 



Thus, this " propaganda in action " of the Peasants' Bank facihtated 

 the accompHshment of their mission for the land commissions : it started 

 a new current, which could not but extend by mere force of circumstances, 

 and which nothing could arrest. And in fact we see that apphcations for 

 readjustment came in the early years in greatest number precisely from 

 peasants in the Governments where the population had already a certain 

 notion of the work to be accompHshed by the projected reform, namely, 

 the Governments of Vitebsk, Mohilev and Kovno, as weU as various Go- 

 vernments of Little and South West Russia, such as Volhynia, Kiev, 

 Voronetz and Kharkov. 



In order that the reader may have a general idea of what has been ac- 

 compHshed up to the present, we reproduce a table showing the progress 

 of the work of readjustment carried out by the Land Commissions, from the 

 date of their institution up to 191 2. 



