688 Agricultural Depression at Home and Abroad. 
series of remarkable articles which had appeared in a Russian 
agricultural paper. These articles consisted of comments upon 
the appointment of a Special Commission to inquire into the 
causes of the agricultural crisis, with suggestions as to the 
remedies. The general lowering of grain prices was given as 
the first cause of the distress, and others were the want of an 
organised means of transport of grain, the high rail rates 
charged, exorbitant interest on Government and private loans, 
loss of capital among agriculturists and their hopeless indebted- 
ness, heavy taxation, and bad harvests. The terrible famine of 
1891 completed the impoverishment of millions of the occupiers 
of land. Writing in 1892, and referring mainly to the most 
fertile districts of Russia, the black soil region which formerly 
produced about GO per cent, of the grain grown in the Empire, 
Mr. Howard, British representative at St. Petersburg, referred 
to the widespread distress, the steady deterioration of the soil, 
the exhaustion of the peasants’ resources, and the crushing 
burden of taxation. Cattle rearing, he said, was being given 
up, and grass land was ploughed on the chance of a quick 
gain of money from a prolific harvest. This interesting report 
is full of information as to the sad state of the great bulk of 
the population and the impoverished condition of the large 
proprietors. 
Later reports, written in the autumn of 1893 by acting 
Consul-General Woodhouse and Vice-Consuls Murray and 
Smith, from Odessa, Sebastopol, and Kief, refer to difficulties 
arising from the fall in prices, in spite of the great harvest of 
that year, and the last of the writers named gives an account 
showing a heavy loss on wheat growing on a large farm situated 
in a district where the harvest was not a good one. Again, 
Consul Talbot, of Taganrog, writing in April last, states that the 
harvest of 1893, though over the average, was not a lucrative 
one ; and Vice-Consularr eports from different parts of his district 
state that the agriculturists were heavily in debt and behind- 
hand with their taxes, and refer to the continued depression 
which had induced the Government to grant advances on grain 
to enable farmers to hold it. Similarly in Poland, according to 
Consul-General Grant, the great harvest of 1893 yielded no 
profit to the growers, the price of wheat being below the cost of 
production. “ Were it not for the beetroot and potato crops,” 
this writer says, “ remunerative because they feed the sugar and 
spirit industries, the landed interest would be completely ruined.” 
The new Czar has recognised the deplorable condition of 
agriculturists of all classes by granting measures of relief fi’om 
taxation and reduced interest on State loans. 
