agricultural progress began with the emancipation of the serfs, and increased productivity was everywhere the immediate result of improvements in the method of culture.  Thus the poor light soils of Germany, France, and Holland have been made to produce more than the vaunted “black earth” of Russia.  And from these ameliorations the land-owning class has everywhere derived the chief advantages.  Are not the landed proprietors of England—­the country in which serfage was first abolished—­the richest in the world?  And is not the proprietor of a few hundred morgen in Germany often richer than the Russian noble who has thousands of dessyatins?  By these and similar plausible arguments the Press endeavoured to prove to the proprietors that they ought, even in their own interest, to undertake the emancipation of the serfs.  Many proprietors, however, showed little faith in the abstract principles of political economy and the vague teachings of history as interpreted by the contemporary periodical literature.  They could not always refute the ingenious arguments adduced by the men of more sanguine temperament, but they felt convinced that their prospects were not nearly so bright as these men represented them to be.  They believed that Russia was a peculiar country, and the Russians a peculiar people.  The lower classes in England, France, Holland, and Germany were well known to be laborious and enterprising, while the Russian peasant was notoriously lazy, and would certainly, if left to himself, not do more work than was absolutely necessary to keep him from starving.  Free labour might be more profitable than serfage in countries where the upper classes possessed traditional practical knowledge and abundance of capital, but in Russia the proprietors had neither the practical knowledge nor the ready money necessary to make the proposed ameliorations in the system of agriculture.  To all this it was added that a system of emancipation by which the peasants should receive land and be made completely independent of the landed proprietors had nowhere been tried on such a large scale.

There were thus two diametrically opposite opinions regarding the economic results of the abolition of serfage, and we have now to examine which of these two opinions has been confirmed by experience.

Let us look at the question first from the point of view of the land-owners.

The reader who has never attempted to make investigations of this kind may naturally imagine that the question can be easily decided by simply consulting a large number of individual proprietors, and drawing a general conclusion from their evidence.  In reality I found the task much more difficult.  After roaming about the country for five years (1870-75), collecting information from the best available sources, I hesitated to draw any sweeping conclusions, and my state of mind at that time was naturally reflected in the early editions of this work.  As a rule the proprietors could