SUSPICIOUS PEASANTS. 163 



Their timidity and suspicions, it is fair to say, were 

 not always the result of superstition. In some cases 

 superstition and ignorance formed the groundwork of 

 their objections, but their chief fears were that we 

 were agents of the government. In one small village 

 the people were so convinced that we were government 

 spies secretly assessing their property that a delegation 

 of elders waited on us and naively offered to pay us 

 for undervaluing their belongings. The peasants are 

 always in dread of some new scheme of squeezing 

 more money out of their pockets. The traveler finds 

 among these people the same dread of government 

 officials as in Turkey, Persia, China, and other countries 

 where the officials are notoriously corrupt, though not 

 in the same degree. The evidence of bad government, 

 which finds expression in the servile prostitution of 

 the peasantry before the minions of the governing 

 power, is seen to the best advantage in the Armenian 

 villages of Asiatic Turkey. The arrival of a Turkish 

 officer in a village creates as much consternation 

 among the people as if they were rats in a pit, and the 

 man in uniform the terrier, who is heavily backed to 

 kill them all in a certain length of time. Nine tenths 

 of them are invisible from the time of his arrival to his 

 departure ; the other tenth hover about, watchful and 

 alert, to anticipate his every wish. The state of affairs 

 in Russia is a decided improvement on this ; but when 

 the worst fears of the peasants take the form of sus- 

 picion that the stranger who comes among them is 

 an officer of the government, something evidently is 

 wrong. 



One sees less of the military element in provincial 



