f^fij 



the; great cannon: kremun, Moscow 



The Tsar's cannon, or the king of cannons, weighs a little more than forty tons, and is 

 seventeen and two-thirds feet in length. It was long considered the largest cannon in the 

 world, and has never been fired. Probably heavier cannon than this are being fired this very 

 day in the European war. 



and to be paid for by the villages in in- 

 stalments running 50 years. 



This act of Alexander, taken so shortly 

 before Lincoln's Emancipation Procla- 

 mation, makes our freeing of the negro 

 look small in comparison. Alexander's 

 ukase affected 50 million bondmen, nearly 

 as many persons as are now living in the 

 12 most populous States of the Union, 

 as follows : New York, Pennsylvania, Il- 

 linois, Ohio, Texas, Massachusetts, Mis- 

 souri, Michigan, Indiana, Georgia, New 

 Jersey, and California. Lincoln's procla- 

 mation affected less than four million ; 

 Alexander's ukase affected more than 

 half of his country's population ; Lin- 

 coln's proclamation directly touched less 

 than an eighth of our population. 



While this achievement in agrarian re- 

 form helped the serfs a good deal, it did 



not accomplish all they had expected ; 

 indeed, it fell far short of the relief they 

 desired. 



The peasants could not understand why 

 it was that, having been born on the land, 

 having tilled it from time immemorial, 

 and having been its caretakers and the 

 source of its value for centuries, they 

 should be forced to pay for it. Many of 

 their villages long groaned under the 

 burden of paying for the communal prop- 

 erty thus transferred to them at prices 

 they had no part in fixing. 



The ukase freeing the serfs gave them 

 a communal form of government for their 

 villages. They had had their legislative 

 assemblies from immemorial antiquity, 

 but it was not until the act of emancipa- 

 tion that the village community was with- 

 drawn from the patrimonial jurisdiction 



449 



