terrorism which founded and maintained the military colonies? As was the seed so must the harvest be.

Insurrection is at all times difficult among a people scattered over immense plains, inhabiting villages exposed and patched up of mere wooden huts. The only refuge of such a people is in the forests, and count Woronzoff has shown in the Caucasus how to deal with that refuge.

Besides, the irregularities of the administrative government confuse the popular notions. The peasant serf of a rich proprietor rejoices to find in his powerful master a sort of buckler against the vexations of employés and of the police. The condition of the serfs is not one of uniform hardship and degradation, hence the difficulty of any simultaneous insurrectional movement, or of any united organisation; hence the rebellions of the peasants remain isolated, local, and limited to single communes, rarely extending even to two or three.

According to the last census the number of male serfs in Russia was 11 380 000 (the women are not reckoned). Two-thirds

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of this number belong to lords who possess at least a thousand peasants a piece, and who generally demand nothing of their serf hut l’obrok, a pecuniary rent-service, for which they give them up the land entirely.

These peasants, and all who belong to rich lords, are usually, it may be imagined, far less miserable than those who are dependent upon petty gentry, and subjected to the rabot (à la corvée, or forced labour). Scarcely ever do the great lords live upon their lands; never more than a few months of the fine season, while the petty seigneur lives all the year round upon his estate, and strives to economize the forced expenses of his sojourn in the metropolis. Mean and restless by position he meddles with everything, turns all to profit, exacts all sorts of renders beyond the rent actually due, in the shape of eggs, mushrooms, linen, fruit, butter, milk, and poultry. And to solace his ennui he amuses himself in poaching on the conjugal manors of his dependents.

These small properties are dispersed at random over the whole extent of Russian territory in Europe. Siberia has the happiness not to know serfdom. Surrounded by vast domains, or by large free communes, the poor serfs remain utterly isolated from their neighbours. Not but that the Russian peasants feel intense commiseration for one another, but when has a mere mutual sentiment of pity ever armed the oppressed masses for the vindication of their rights? In 1839 and 1840, we saw, indeed, the beginnings of a coalition among the communes. In the districts of Simbirsk and of Tambow, the massacre of the lords looked like the execution of a plan. But usually matters do not take that course. The peasants of a commune are dumb and patient for years and years: they suffer and endure all miseries without a murmur. Suddenly, without a note of warning, they burst out, massacre the lord, butcher his family, burn his house; receive with dogged endurance the punishment of the plet, and are hurried away to perish in the mines of Siberia. They know the result beforehand; but their situation was no longer tolerable. The causes of insurrections are worthy of serious attention. They generally spring from the encroachment of the lord upon the rights of the commune. The peasant feels himself victimized, without protection or redress: he is overworked, overtaxed, continually liable

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to excessive punishment from a hard and cruel taskmaster: but all this seems transitory and remediable. What he never does put up with, never submits to without a bloody protest, is the inter¬meddling of the lord in the division of the communal lands, in the rights of pasture, in the affairs of the commune; then he feels himself struck in his last refuge, beyond which he sees nothing. Then the peasant murders his lord. But why, it may be asked, does not the peasant demand redress sooner? To complain of the violation of a right, one must have legal ground upon. Now the commune exists by itself, because it is in cable; because it alone of itself constitutes the whole moral life of the peasants. The government found it ready made; the noblesse submitted to it, and became accustomed to its existence.

According to the law, a peasant can address himself only to the marshal of the noblesse of the district. This marshal, the elected officer of the nobles, is their natural defender, both against the crown and against the people. The police never receives complaints against the lords, except in extraordinary criminal cases, which do not interest directly the peasant. The serf is allowed to inform against his lord, if the latter belongs to a secret society, or has commited a crime. The law permits three day’s work only in the week to be exacted of the serf on the lord’s land; and it is to a police elected by the noblesse that the duty of maintaining the execution of this legal prescription is confided. From time to time the government starts up in sudden amazement at abuses, displays astonishing courage, and punishes a lord or two. Then follows a long dreary interval of abuses, unpunished and unredressed.

CONCLUDING ARTICLE

Just before I left Russia, in 1846, a trial peculiar to those latitudes was creating great excitement in Moscow. A prince, possessing large domains in the province of Orel, had one of his serfs flogged. The serf died under the punishment. According to custom, a priest and his deacon, attended by the sacristan, were present at the burial, and drew up the registry certificate of the man’s death. The good priest signed; the good deacon signed the

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said certificate; but lo, on perusing their joint declaration, the sacristan made the sacristan made the remark that this was not a case on natural death, but a murder. The priest stared in amazement at the observation, and endeavoured to convince him of his error, and to persuade him to sign. The sacristan obstinately persisted in his refusal. As soon as the prince was informed of this difficulty, presuming that the sacristan would scarcely let such a good opportunity slip without improving it, he sent the poor wretch a few hundred roubles. Still the sacristan held out, and calling on the priest and deacon to attest the bribe, he disappeared from thence, to reappear at Orel, where he penetrated into the presence of his archbishop, and to him related the affair. The archbishop, unprepared for such an emergency, wrote to consult the governor, and the superior priest of the district. Now, the governor of Orel happened to be a near relative of the murderer. It may be imagined he spared no effort to hush up the affair altogether; but the inflexible sacristan stuck fast to his allegations. The affair got abroad, and placed the police in a situation of considerable embarrassment, for the crime was but too evident. The secret police gave information of the whole story to the emperor. The governor was removed; the inquest resumed on a different footing, proof after proof establisched the fact that the prince of Trubetskoi and his wife had been in the habit of practising the most abominable cruelties towards their serfs. Subterranean dungeons were discovered in the seigneurial mansion, in which prisoners languished in chains. Dungeons and irons, it should be understood, are equally foreign to Russian customs. The prince was tried, condemned, degraded, deprived of all his titles, and, accompanied by his worthy helpmate, packed off to Siberia. Nor did the emperor stop there, but ordered all the marshals of the district, since the installation of the prince in his domains, to be tried for the crime. As might be expected, however, this measure was not carried out. Ch. — the then Minister of Justice, was among these marshals, and the matter was not pushed any further, out of deference for one of the most mediocre of administrators.

The relations between the nobles and the peasants are anything but sound. Indeed they are as strained and insecure as reciprocal distrust can make them. The patriarchal relations of which Haxthausen

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speaks, where then did he find them? The great lords, in the time of Catherine II, treated their peasantry with a sort of aristocratic consideration and tutelary regard; the small proprietors also, because they had not yet cast off the manners of the peasants, among whom they lived in extreme simplicity. But the succeeding generation separated themselves more and more from the peasants, and from their simple manners. Civilization suggested to the nobility new wants, and with these wants new ways and means. The developments of industry and manufactures, the diffusion of the principles of political economy adapted to local habits, furnished fresh means of utilising the peasants. The seigneur, that «patriarch», that «chief of the clan», that «father of the commune», from an aristocrat became by degrees manufacturer, planter, slaveowner.

Mr. Haxthausen has seen all this, and is as well aware of it as I can be, but in his capacity of an absolutist demagogue he is, doubtless, obliged to pass it over in silence. This author, who has unfortunately marred his interesting work by an indescribably frantic passion for royalism4[4], knows too well the organization of the Russian commune, not to have known that the power of the seigneur is an excrescence upon the commune into which it has entered as an element altogether foreign, parasitical, and destitute of normal basis. He succeeds as little in explaining, by a pretended patriarchalism the seigneurial prerogatives, as in justifying the oppressive despotism of Petersburg by the sublimity of obedience, a passion which this enlightened German calls the