Alexander sanctioned for the serfs of the Baltic provinces, would, we do not hesitate to say, be one of those errors which destroy a nation. The question, now so simple, would be hopelessly entangled.

The result would be a proletariat of twenty millions of men, in a country already so ill governed, that the free peasant and the petite bourgeoisie find no shelter against the vexations of an arbitrary police — where, in a word, such a thing as personal security does not exist. The lords would coalesce, the government support the coalition! The communal element, the grand element of Slavonic life, would be utterly destroyed (frappé au coeur) — the commune would be broken up. We should witness the ruin of the only blessing which the Russian peasant has preserved — the base, the keystone, without which Russia would crumble into decay — without which that monstrous panautocracy which extends from Torneo to the Amur, would cease to exist.

I know that there are persons so rationally disposed that they would abandon a positive and certain pledge for the germ of a possible expectation. They would rejoice in the formation of a proletariat, because they would see in it the source of revolutionary expansion; but is every proletaire necessarily a revolutionist?

SECOND ARTICLE

The rustic labourer (prolétaire) is not, generally speaking, a revolutionist, like the operatives of great cities. In those dense hives of monopolized industry, in those huge Pandemonia of luxury and starvation, of beggary and debauch, of famished ignorance and blasé corruption, of squalid pauperism and insolent gold, of colossal financiers and blazoned Macaires, of whirling wealth, and maddening want, and cruel contrasts, — in great cities, no doubt, the working man becomes a revolutionist; not so in the solitude of the fields. It requires long centuries of suffering and a religions struggle to create a war of the peasants, as in the sixteenth century.

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Talk of dissolving the Russian commune! I should like to know whether the few Russians who propose such a measure have ever seriously reflected on the scheme. What would remain, I ask, if we tore out this vital nerve of our national existence? The Russian people has endured every loss, and has only preserved the commune. Is it at a time when it occurs to so many of the thinkers of Western Europe to deplore the excessive subdivision of the soil, that we should, with a blind levity, root up an institution which we have only to conserve passively, for it maintains itself spontaneously in the people and by the people, attached to it by interest and by tradition, as to the one sole right which rapacity and oppression have not yet wrung from their hands.

The commune is, I am aware, accused of being incompatible with individual liberty. Was this liberty wanting before the abolition of the day of Youri (St. George)? Did it not create, beside the permanent village, the moving commune, the voluntary association of artel (artisans) and that other purely martial commune of the Cossacks? That fixed rural commune left to individual liberty and initiative a part quite large enough, since it never ceased to provide for and to nourish its twin legitimate offspring — one the mounted and moving rampart of the country; the other, hatchet in hand, transporting himself wherever work invited him.

True, the members of the Cossack commune were not individually absorbed or effaced by them. Even those who may have read Gogol’s novel, «Taras Boulba», have little idea that a similar story occured in the time of Alexander I. An aged Cossack, who refused to submit to the ferocious discipline of the military colonies, after receiving himself a few thousand blows with a stick, witnessed in silence the barbarous punishment inflicted on his eldest son, and only opened his lips to inquire how it was that his younger son was spared. When he learned that the latter had purchased impunity by submission, the old father embraced his eldest son, cursed the son who had recoiled before the punishment, covered himself up in his casaquine, and perished on the spot.

Cossackry (la Cosacquerie) is a palpable proof that the popular life in Russia contained in itself the complement of the peaceble existence of the rural commune. Cossackry, in fact, threw open an

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escape for all reckless and impatient spirits thirsting for adventure, hungry after excitement, panting for dangerous exploits, and a wild independance. It corresponded perfectly with that principle of unrestrained turbulence which we express by the word oudal, and which is one of the characteristic features of the Slavonic race.

The Cossacks, indefatigable sentinels at the most exposed frontiers of their country, founded at these perilous outposts military, republican, and democratic communities, which were still in existence at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Theirs is a brilliant history. The Zaporogues were the knight-errants of the democratic commonalty. Unyielding, indomitable brigands, rather than subjects of any authority whatsoever, they seemed to inherit those vague presentiments, those prophetic instincts which distinguished the Norman races. Under Ivan IV, a band of Cossacks conquered Siberia. Their chief, Ermack, not content with having penetrated as far as Tobolsk, reared with a dying hand his standart at Irkoutsk. After him, another Cossack pushed on across icy wastes, as if he were drawn by some magnetic influence, to the Pacific Ocean: perhaps by a presentiment of the immense significance of Russia advancing her bounds to the very frontiers of America.

Nothing but the imbecility of the German government at St. Petersburg could have failed to comprehend such an institution as that of the Cossacks. Peter the Great was the first to oppress them, too happy to be furnished with a pretext by Mazeppas. Catherine reduced millions of them to slavery. Nicholas destroyed their democratic organisation by making nobles of their elected officers,

and he tried even to corrupt their popular ballads. Such an institution was, of course, scarcely reconcilable with the military code of Russia. It was thought for wiser to create out of brutal violence those absurd military colonies than to permit some developments to a flourishing and profoundly popular institution.

It is not to be disputed that the communal life of the Russian villages and the republicanism of the Cossack camps would ill satisfy the aspirations of later European theorists. All was embryonic in their constitution. Individual liberty was everywhere

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where sacrificed to a democratic and patriarchal broutherhood. But who pulls down an unfinished house in the idea of rebuilding it on the same plan? It is no merit of ours to have preserved with an immutable quietism that communal institution which the German peoples had long lost amidst the vicissitudes of their history. But it is an advantage not to be thrown away. And we may surely profit by the dear-bought experience of our ancestors.

Western Europe sacrificed its communal institutions, and with them the peasants and the artisans, when it entered upon a richer and larger existence by a long and glorious struggle for the emancipation of an aristocratic and middle-class minority. It has had Catholicism, protestantism, its chivalry full of poetry, its tiers-état renowned for pertinacity, its Reformation, and finally its revolution, which half destroyed the Church and the Throne. Russia alone has remained aloof from the conquests and glories of her neighbours. Her people, utterly incapable of following, still less of attaining the European developments, has languished in misery ever since the era of Kiev. The yoke of the Mongols, Byzantinesque czars, Germanized emperors, lords like slaveholders, such have been her masters. Yet this people, while it has gained nothing, has at least not lost the commune, with the equality of all its members in the possession and in the distribution of the soil.

If, indeed, the Russian peasant has been reduced to serfage it has not been without severe struggle. The facile success of the spurious Dmetri, the enthusiasm of the people for him, his imitators crushed, but ever reappearing with formidable armies encamped before Moscow, all this story would be inexplicable but for the undercurrent of a strong, wide, deep popular movement. These protracted struggles of an entire people may not disturb the reign of the House of Romanoff but the falsified chronicles of the government could not pass over in silence the wars of the Brigands. Stenko Razin, one of their chiefs, was at the head 200 000 men. During the reign of the czar Alexis more than 12 000 peasants were hanged. A century later the empress Catherine more than once turned pale at the reports of her generals on the insurrection of Pugatcheff. Pugatcheff committed a fatal error, since repeated by Kossuth. After the decisive capture of

Kasan he did not march straight on Moscow, where, according to the evidence of Castéra, 200 000 serfs awaited his army with breathless impatience. The common people (moujik) were decimated in the name of civilization, and Voltaire congratulated the Semiramis of the North on the victories of Bibikoff and Panine.

It was by proclaiming the freedom of the peasants that Pugatcheff raised the standard of revolt. He had for device, Ultor et redivivus. Taken prisoner and loaded with chains, he replied to the ignoble general who struck him with his hand, and to that facile outrage added words of insult: — «I am but a little crow, and the vulture is still hovering in the air»3[3].

After a contest of a hundred and fifty years the people abandoned the struggle. Pugatcheff was the last of its leaders. It has never made its appearance since except in the commotion of Staraia Roussa in 1831. In that revolt it was horribly sanguinary; but what was to be expected in reprisal for the