With all due deference to Russian economists, I may say parenthetically that they are very found of juggling with carelessly collected statistics, as if their data were mathematical quantities.
Several of the Zemstvos have grappled with this question of peasant impoverishment, and the data which they have collected make a very doleful impression. In the province of Moscow, for example, a careful investigation gave the following results: Forty per cent.
of the peasant households had no longer any horses, 15 per cent.
had given up agriculture altogether, and about 10 per cent. had no longer any land. We must not, however, assume, as is often done, that the peasant families who have no live stock and no longer till the land are utterly ruined. In reality many of them are better off than their neighbours who appear as prosperous in the official statistics, having found profitable occupation in the home industries, in the towns, in the factories, or on the estates of the landed proprietors. It must be remembered that Moscow is the centre of one of the regions in which manufacturing industry has progressed with gigantic strides during the last half-century, and it would be strange indeed if, in such a region, the peasantry who supply the labour to the towns and factories remained thriving agriculturists. That many Russians are surprised and horrified at the actual state of things shows to what an extent the educated classes are still under the illusion that Russia can create for herself a manufacturing industry capable of competing with that of Western Europe without uprooting from the soil a portion of her rural population.
It is only in the purely agricultural regions that families officially classed as belonging to the peasantry may be regarded as on the brink of pauperism because they have no live stock, and even with regard to them I should hesitate to make such an assumption, because the muzhiks, as I have already had occasion to remark, have strange nomadic habits unknown to the rural population of other countries. It is a mistake, therefore, to calculate the Russian peasant's budget exclusively on the basis of local resources.
To the pessimists who assure me that according to their calculations the peasantry in general must be on the brink of starvation, I reply that there are many facts, even in the statistical tables on which they rely, which run counter to their deductions. Let me quote one by way of illustration. The total amount of deposits in savings banks, about one-fourth of which is believed to belong to the rural population, rose in the course of six years (1894-1900) from 347 to 680 millions of roubles. Besides the savings banks, there existed in the rural districts on 1st December, 1902, no less than 1,614 small-credit institutions, with a total capital (1st January, 1901) of 69 million roubles, of which only 4,653,000 had been advanced by the State Bank and the Zemstvo, the remainder coming in from private sources. This is not much for a big country like Russia, but it is a beginning, and it suggests that the impoverishment is not so severe and so universal as the pessimists would have us believe.
There is thus room for differences of opinion as to how far the peasantry have become impoverished, but there is no doubt that their condition is far from satisfactory, and we have to face the important problem why the abolition of serfage has not produced the beneficent consequences which even moderate men so confidently predicted, and how the present unsatisfactory state of things is to be remedied.
The most common explanation among those who have never seriously studied the subject is that it all comes from the demoralisation of the common people. In this view there is a modicum of truth. That the peasantry injure their material welfare by drunkenness and improvidence there can be no reasonable doubt, as is shown by the comparatively flourishing state of certain villages of Old Ritualists and Molokanye in which there is no drunkenness, and in which the community exercises a strong moral control over the individual members. If the Orthodox Church could make the peasantry refrain from the inordinate use of strong drink as effectually as it makes them refrain during a great part of the year from animal food, and if it could instil into their minds a few simple moral principles as successfully as it has inspired them with a belief in the efficacy of the Sacraments, it would certainly confer on them an inestimable benefit. But this is not to be expected. The great majority of the parish priests are quite unfit for such a task, and the few who have aspirations in that direction rarely acquire a perceptible moral influence over their parishioners. Perhaps more is to be expected from the schoolmaster than from the priest, but it will be long before the schools can produce even a partial moral regeneration. Their first influence, strange as the assertion may seem, is often in a diametrically opposite direction. When only a few peasants in a village can read and write they have such facilities for overreaching their "dark"
neighbours that they are apt to employ their knowledge for dishonest purposes; and thus it occasionally happens that the man who has the most education is the greatest scoundrel in the Mir.
Such facts are often used by the opponents of popular education, but in reality they supply a good reason for disseminating primary education as rapidly as possible. When all the peasants have learned to read and write they will present a less inviting field for swindling, and the temptations to dishonesty will be proportionately diminished. Meanwhile, it is only fair to state that the common assertions about drunkenness being greatly on the increase are not borne out by the official statistics concerning the consumption of spirituous liquors.