GENERAL OUTLINE OF THE NEW RUSSIAN LAND REFORMS 1 47 



In these last lines the Report of the Peasants' Bank touches what 

 has been a weak point in the organization of the sale of land to peasants 

 up to the present : the deplorable part played by intermediaries, generally 

 Jews, who have monopolised this kind of trade to the detriment of the 

 landowners and peasants, while the Bank itself has not always been able 

 to dispense with the services of these middlemen and speculators. 



To prevent these abuses, advantage was taken of the work of the land 

 commissions, to which was entrusted the special duty of advising in regard to 

 prices and the value the land offered for sale to the Peasants' Bank might 

 have for colonisation and of playing the part of impartial intermediaries 

 between the landowners selling and the Bank on the one hand, and the Bank 

 and the peasants bu3-ing on the other, so as to more and more prevent the 

 disastrous action of the professional speculators in land. The following 

 figures relating to the services rendered by the land commissions as inter- 

 mediaries show that they have not been slow in attaining this high object. 



Table XI. — Intermediary Service of the Land Commissions 

 in the Purchase of Land by the Peasants' Bank. 



Almost all offers of land for sale made to the Peasants' Bank are now 

 examined by the land commissions and this is often the case with the 

 prices asked by the landowners. In the course of the last five years, the 

 commissions have considered the value of 2,449 holdings of an area of 

 2.514,380 deciatines. This has led to the reduction of the price asked by 

 the sellers from 145 to iii roubles per deciatine, or almost 25 %. These 

 figures show the necessity and success of this intervention of the land com- 

 missions in the business of the purchase of land. The land commissions 

 also intervene in business conducted directly between peasants and 

 landowners (without the mediation of the Peasants' Bank). In this 

 business directly conducted, the commissions have had to give their 

 opinion, in 16,035 cases relating to farms of a total area of 1,961,581 

 deciatines. 



We shall now see how the Peasants' Bank proceeded in disposing 

 of this enormous quantity of land, for of course it was not provided 

 with the necessary organization for so large a scheme of home colonisation. 



