Scarcely less pernicious than the tchinovnik, in the eyes of our would-be reformer, is the baritch—­that is to say, the pampered, capricious, spoiled child of mature years, whose life is spent in elegant indolence and fine talking.  Our friend Victor Alexandr’itch is commonly selected as a representative of this type.  “Look at him!” exclaims Alexander Ivan’itch.  “What a useless, contemptible member of society!  In spite of his generous aspirations he never succeeds in doing anything useful to himself or to others.  When the peasant question was raised and there was work to be done, he went abroad and talked liberalism in Paris and Baden-Baden.  Though he reads, or at least professes to read, books on agriculture, and is always ready to discourse on the best means of preventing the exhaustion of the soil, he knows less of farming than a peasant-boy of twelve, and when he goes into the fields he can hardly distinguish rye from oats.  Instead of babbling about German and Italian music, he would do well to learn a little about practical farming, and look after his estate.”

Whilst Alexander Ivan’itch thus censures his neighbours, he is himself not without detractors.  Some staid old proprietors regard him as a dangerous man, and quote expressions of his which seem to indicate that his notions of property are somewhat loose.  Many consider that his liberalism is of a very violent kind, and that he has strong republican sympathies.  In his decisions as Justice he often leaned, it is said, to the side of the peasants against the proprietors.  Then he was always trying to induce the peasants of the neighbouring villages to found schools, and he had wonderful ideas about the best method of teaching children.  These and similar facts make many people believe that he has very advanced ideas, and one old gentleman habitually calls him—­half in joke and half in earnest—­“our friend the communist.”

In reality Alexander Ivan’itch has nothing of the communist about him.  Though he loudly denounces the tchinovnik spirit—­or, as we should say, red-tape in all its forms—­and is an ardent partisan of local self-government, he is one of the last men in the world to take part in any revolutionary movement, he would like to see the Central Government enlightened and controlled by public opinion and by a national representation, but he believes that this can only be effected by voluntary concessions on the part of the autocratic power.  He has, perhaps, a sentimental love of the peasantry, and is always ready to advocate its interests; but he has come too much in contact with individual peasants to accept those idealised descriptions in which some popular writers indulge, and it may safely be asserted that the accusation of his voluntarily favouring peasants at the expense of the proprietors is wholly unfounded.  Alexander Ivan’itch is, in fact, a quiet, sensible man, who is capable of generous enthusiasm, and is not at all satisfied with the existing state of things; but he is not a dreamer and a revolutionnaire, as some of his neighbours assert.