These institutions may have been useful to the few who desired to improve their estates, but they certainly did not cure, and rather tended to foster, the inveterate improvidence of the many.  On the eve of the Emancipation the proprietors were indebted to the Government for the sum of 425 millions of roubles, and 69 per cent. of their serfs were mortgaged.  A portion of this debt was gradually extinguished by the redemption operation, so that in 1880 over 300 millions had been paid off, but in the meantime new debts were being contracted.  In 1873-74 nine private land-mortgage banks were created, and there was such a rush to obtain money from them that their paper was a glut in the market, and became seriously depreciated.  When the prices of grain rose in 1875-80 the mortgage debt was diminished, but when they began to fall in 1880 it again increased, and in 1881 it stood at 396 millions.  As the rate of interest was felt to be very burdensome there was a strong feeling among the landed proprietors at that time that the Government ought to help them, and in 1883 the nobles of the province of Orel ventured to address the Emperor on the subject.  In reply to the address, Alexander III., who had strong Conservative leanings, was graciously pleased to declare in an ukaz that “it was really time to do something to help the Noblesse,” and accordingly a new land-mortgage bank for the Noblesse was created.  The favourable terms offered by it were taken advantage of to such an extent that in the first four years of its activity (1886-90) it advanced to the proprietors over 200 million roubles.  Then came two famine years, and in 1894 the mortgage debt of the Noblesse in that and other credit establishments was estimated at 994 millions.  It has since probably increased rather than diminished, for in that year the prices of grain began to fall steadily on all the corn-exchanges of the world, and they have never since recovered.

By means of mortgages some proprietors succeeded in weathering the storm, but many gave up the struggle altogether, and settled in the towns.  In the space of thirty years 20,000 of them sold their estates, and thus, between 1861 and 1892, the area of land possessed by the Noblesse diminished 30 per cent.—­from 77,804,000 to 55,500,000 dessyatins.

This expropriation of the Noblesse, as it is called, was evidently not the result merely of the temporary economic disturbance caused by the abolition of serfage, for as time went on it became more rapid.  During the first twenty years the average annual amount of Noblesse land sold was 517,000 dessyatins, and it rose steadily until 1892-96, when it reached the amount of 785,000.  As I have already stated, the townward movement of the proprietors was strongest in the barren Northern provinces.  In the province of Olonetz, for example, they have already parted with 87 per cent. of their land.  In the black-soil region, on the contrary, there is no province in which more than 27 per cent. of the Noblesse land has been alienated, and in one province (Tula) the amount is only 19 per cent.