* The term Zemstvo is derived from the word Zemlya, meaning land, and might be translated, if a barbarism were permissible, by Land-dom on the analogy of Kingdom, Dukedom, etc.

My personal acquaintance with this interesting institution dates from 1870.  Very soon after my arrival at Novgorod in that year, I made the acquaintance of a gentleman who was described to me as “the president of the provincial Zemstvo-bureau,” and finding him amiable and communicative, I suggested that he might give me some information regarding the institution of which he was the chief local representative.  With the utmost readiness he proposed to be my Mentor, introduced me to his colleagues, and invited me to come and see him at his office as often as I felt inclined.  Of this invitation I made abundant use.  At first my visits were discreetly few and short, but when I found that my new friend and his colleagues really wished to instruct me in all the details of Zemstvo administration, and had arranged a special table in the president’s room for my convenience, I became a regular attendant, and spent daily several hours in the bureau, studying the current affairs, and noting down the interesting bits of statistical and other information which came before the members, as if I had been one of their number.  When they went to inspect the hospital, the lunatic asylum, the seminary for the preparation of village schoolmasters, or any other Zemstvo institution, they invariably invited me to accompany them, and made no attempt to conceal from me the defects which they happened to discover.

I mention all this because it illustrates the readiness of most Russians to afford every possible facility to a foreigner who wishes seriously to study their country.  They believe that they have long been misunderstood and systematically calumniated by foreigners, and they are extremely desirous that the prevalent misconceptions regarding their country should be removed.  It must be said to their honour that they have little or none of that false patriotism which seeks to conceal national defects; and in judging themselves and their institutions they are inclined to be over-severe rather than unduly lenient.  In the time of Nicholas I. those who desired to stand well with the Government proclaimed loudly that they lived in the happiest and best-governed country of the world, but this shallow official optimism has long since gone out of fashion.  During all the years which I spent in Russia I found everywhere the utmost readiness to assist me in my investigations, and very rarely noticed that habit of “throwing dust in the eyes of foreigners,” of which some writers have spoken so much.