the young grass of April. In midsummer the valley of the Ingoda unreels a film of charming pictures: low, forested mountains marching with you in the distance; sleek cattle browsing lazily in natural meadows bespangled with wild flowers; cow-boys lounging about on their horses; rude pole fences inclosing wide farms; neat log houses, each with its garden. The settlers are upstanding and virile, on the whole better-looking than you will see at many stations in our Pacific Northwest. The wild-wood is unravaged, the streams are unstained, the meadows are nature's own herbarium. Everything is clean and fresh, as yet undefiled by excess of human beings.

In Khilok Vale, where the settlers are hewing their way into primeval forest, the occupying of the land is a stage further advanced. Felled trees lie at the borders of the clearings, and the crops grow amid. charred stumps. Bees hum about us at the water-tank stops, while at the stations bottles of milk and kvass and baskets of eggs are to be had at ridiculously low prices. Nevertheless, the river-bottom is bright with the intense green of wild grass, and to the angler's ear the clear, swift brooks whisper, "Trout!"

A thousand miles west you are in Nebraska instead of the valley, with some

level country, cottonwoods along the watercourses, groves about the scattered farm-houses, spacious fields of oats and wheat; but the absence of turnpikes, wire fences, swing gates, pumps, vivid mills, and modern agricultural implements reveals a less progressive spirit than has wrought on the Nebraska prairie and on the pampa of Argentina. No ridingplow, disk harrow, or reaper, is seen, and only west of Omsk does the first mowingmachine appear. Everywhere one sees the scythe and the sickle.

When, after crossing the unimpressive Urals, the American finds himself in European Russia, he looks out upon an agriculture totally unfamiliar to him. The fields are full of long, narrow strips like the rag-carpet of olden time, in which this inch of blue represented a discarded shirt, and that handbreadth of gray embodied an old army blanket. The strips run from two to ten yards wide, and the contrast between adjacent strips indicates that they have been tilled by different persons. The summer fallow fields are likewise in ribbon-like strips, some plowed and others stubble. The fence dividing the fallow land, which is pastured, from the crops is in sections from two to six rods long, maintained by different persons. One section will be new, the next one tumbling down. One section will be of poles, while the one beyond will be of rails. There are

no farm-houses about the fields, but every few miles we see a gray huddle of thatched, unpainted huts, and from it in all directions wind paths to the cultivated land.

At once the practised eye is struck with the folly of handling land in such narrow strips. Each has to be plowed by itself, which means that down the center is a "headland" about sixteen inches wide which is not turned over at all. Then between the strips down the "dead furrow" is a like slice which the plow cannot manage. Thus every season from five to twenty per cent. of the strip lies unbroken. Looking over a field of wheat sowed in strips, one is struck by the unevenness of the stand, by the ragged rows of weeds between the strips, and by the number of neglected flats scattering weed seed upon the neighboring land. One misses the solid richness of the wheat-field that has been handled as a unit.

Strip tillage is imposed by a communal system of land-holding which died out in western Europe centuries ago, but, owing to certain historical causes, still dominates Russian agriculture and governs the relation to the soil of nearly a hundred million rural people. To get the system in the concrete let us take a particular village, that of K—. This village contains 150 "yards," or steadings, and has two thousand inhabitants; the owners of the "yards" constitute an obstchina, or mir, which owns thousands of acres of the surrounding land.

This communal land is classified as "good" and "poor," and each class in turn is divided into three nearly equal fields, one of which lies fallow every year, while the other two are bearing crops. Every member of the association has a strip in each of these fields, six in all. This, however, is about the simplest apportionment one will find. In most cases distinction is made between bottom-land and upland, between sandy soil and loam, between level and rough, and even between the far and the near land. In order to give every member his due share of each sort of soil, it is necessary to have sev

eral fields, in each of which he will have his portion. Thus he may have his fifteen or twenty acres snipped into thirty or more very slender strips.

Since, however, one outfit of strips may be a little more desirable than another, and since equality among the members is the cardinal principle of the mir, it is customary to have every year, or every third year, a re-allotment, a fresh deal of the cards, so to speak. The peasant therefore has no personal interest in manuring his land, subsoiling it, ridding it of weeds, laying it down in clover, or sparing it lucrative, but exhausting, crops, such as sunflower. What is the use of building up the soil when the next holder will get most of the benefit?

Again, population tends to grow,

whereas the amount of land at the disposal of the mir may be stationary. In order to provide for the increase, it is necessary to cut up the fields into a larger number of holdings. Just before my visit to K it had experienced a veritable upheaval. The land had not been reapportioned since the emancipation of the serfs fifty-four years ago. Each householder's share had descended to one of his sons, while the rest worked as day-laborers on the neighboring estate of Count Sor sought a living in the city. Inspired by the new democratic self - assertiveness sweeping through the Russian masses, these landless ones had forced their way into the mir and obtained a redistribution of its acreage into a much larger number of parcels. Even after taking in soil which hitherto had been scorned, there were not more than sixteen acres apiece, which means that the peasant will have to supplement his scanty produce by working out for wages.

Rural Russia, therefore, presents a totally different aspect from rural America. Instead of house, red barn, windmill, and grove on every farm, the tiled fields stretch away for miles to some village where lives nobody but farmers. The village is not a pretty affair of a few score of families, as is the typical rural hamlet of France or Germany. The num

ber of inhabitants runs into the thousands, and one hears of villages of twelve or even fifteen thousand souls. Such a population requires a lot of land, and even if the land were in a compact block, with the village in the center, there would be a dismal loss of time between the homes and the remote fields. But in general the land does not lie so conveniently. It may straggle along a valley, or be broken into separate parcels by a river, a great estate, or a stretch of waste. The village may lie at one end or one corner of the mir land instead of at the center. Hence one

hears of fields lying twelve, fifteen, or even twenty miles from those who are to cultivate them. When he goes to till his strips in these distant fields, the peasant takes provisions, and camps under his wagon till the job is done. It is needless to hint that in such circumstances the remote parts of the mir's land will be poorly looked after, if, indeed, they are not altogether abandoned to the weeds.

On the princely domain of Count S which stretches away over hill and valley until it encompasses a hundred thousand acres, we find an utterly different type of agriculture. The estate has been surveyed and marked in ten-acre squares, which are numbered. Every year there is hung up in the office of every foreman a map of the estate on which every square has a tint indicating the kind of crop it is to bear the coming season. A scientific rotation of crops does away with the necessity of summer fallowing. All the manure is restored to the soil, whereas the peasant has to use his manure for household fuel. About headquarters one sees parked hundreds of wagons, plows, barrows, seeders, mowers, reapers, and self-binders, all of the best type. The main stable shelters one hundred and twenty horses. The count's swine run a great deal to leg and snout, but his sheep are high bred. The place blushes for a vodka distillery, which, fortunately, has been quiescent for three years. It boasts, however, its kennel of splendid Russian wolf-hounds, which provide sport for the count when he deigns to pass a few days on his estate.

All parts of this principality of one hundred and fifty square miles are knit by telephone wire, and headquarters is constantly in touch with the minor centers from which the operations of sixteen hundred laborers are directed. In the morning the manager can tell you the number of bushels cleaned up yesterday by each steam thresher on the place, the amount of coal used, the number of hours of labor expended, the bushel cost of threshing each kind of grain, the quantity of feed consumed by the draft animals, and the comparative performance of the different types of each kind of implement. What with rain-gage, dynamometer, and plotted graph, farming goes forward on a tolerably exact basis. One hears in Russia not only of estates so big that a single one requires one hundred and forty steam threshers to clean up its grain, but also of estates in charge of a corps of ogronoms, which, besides having their own foundry and repair-shop, maintain an experiment station equal to those provided by the United States Department of Agriculture. Indeed, nowhere in America is large scale farming carried on so scientifically as on certain Russian estates. The count's farm is by no means a model in this respect, but even he gets twice as much yield per acre as do his peasants from the niggardly 6500 acres he put them off with at the time of their emancipation from serfdom.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the estates are generally run on this plan. Most Russian noblemen prefer to let their land to the peasants rather than to go to the bother and expense of bringing it under a scientific régime. This is why, on the average, their acre yield is only a fourth more than that of the neighboring mir land. Of the 140,000,000 acres in the hands of gentlemen landowners, from a third to a half is rented for cash. Of the rest the larger part is tilled under some form of share-tenancy, owner and tenant being partners in a measure. Not more than ten or fifteen million acres are cultivated by hired laborers, aided by modern machinery, and directed by manager and foremen advised by experts.

The surviving noble estates are only the stump of a tree that formerly shadowed all Muscovy. The early czars so lavishly bestowed seignioral rights upon their nobles that the latter came to be virtually owners of the districts committed to their charge. That the noble might raise the forces needed to beat off Tatar and Pole, the crown gave him power over his people, until in Shakspere's time they became serfs bound to the glebe. In the eighteenth century they were crushed down to a point little short of slavery, and they recovered freedom only in the year we struck the shackles from our negro slaves. that time they came into possession of about half the tilled land of the estates, though their masters saw to it that they got the worse half. They should have been given their half outright, but the reform of Alexander II was carried through with the explicit understanding that the nobles should not suffer any economic damage. So through many years the former serfs toiled to redeem their land by annual payments to their quondam master or to the state, which had advanced them the money with which to quiet his claims.

At

Since emancipation the holdings of the nobility have greatly shrunken. Often their tastes outran their income, so that they drank up, dressed up, or gambled up their hereditary estates. Even without the Revolution, the finish of the landowner class was near. Bit by bit their land has come into calloused hands, and a new class of landholders has appeared, certain certain thrifty and shrewd peasants who have made one hand wash the other, one field buy the next, until they have more than they can till, and let their land like lords. At present it is doubtful if the nobles retain more than a fifth or a sixth of the farm-land of European Russia.

In the meantime the peasants have developed a fierce hunger for land. Even at the outset of their life as freedmen they felt they were put off with too little, and the legend spread among them that the good czar had decreed they should have the acres they had watered with their sweat and that their masters were holding

back the best part of his ukase. In some districts it took a fusillade to correct their minds on this point. Then they have multiplied at a great rate, for the communal system encourages recklessness in the matter of family. Since more sons, the more shares in the village land, intemperate fecundity incurs no punishment. Said to me the author of the land law of 1910:

"I have known a family to speculate anxiously whether the expected baby will be a boy and arrive in time, and to jubilate when a male infant was born the day before the redistribution of the mir land. It meant one more share to that family." This may throw light on why Courland, on the Baltic, which knows not the mir, has the same birth-rate as the United States, while in the communal parts of Russia the births are from two to two and one-half times as frequent as with us.

Not only do the shares shrink as the land is divided among more claimants, but the crude soil-rubbing tillage results. in a declining yield per acre. Like the penumbra of an eclipse, the shadow of soil exhaustion is sweeping across Russia from west to east. The peasants' land is very badly farmed, yet the poor fellows cannot imagine how to extract more from their fields. Of the methods of intensive cultivation they have not the faintest inkling. Thanks to the policy of cherishing darkness as the best friend of the Romanoff dynasty, peasant farming is stubbornly traditional, and there is no way whereby knowledge of soil conservation, deep tillage, rotation of crops, and stock raising can quickly penetrate to the rural population.

As the mass of the peasants find it harder to squeeze a living out of their petty strips, what is more natural than that they should dream of more land? They can, indeed, imagine no other remedy for their distress; so among them spreads the religious doctrine - which never strikes root where there is a sound land policy— that God's earth is for all His children, and that not man, but God, is the rightful owner of the land.

All political parties agree that the class

of gentlemen landowners generally must go. Most of them do nothing for Russian agriculture, and in their present temper the people will not tolerate hereditary parasites. But it is not clear how the dividing of their estates among the nearest mirs is to quiet the clamorous land hunger of the muzhiks. The total area thus to be made available is much less than they imagine, and, besides, the estates are by no means evenly distributed among provinces and districts. In many parts

the peasants will get no land, as there are no estates in their neighborhood. It will not comfort them to know that in the next county the peasants are enjoying fine slices from the carving of some big domain. When they awake to the truth, will not the disappointed raise the cry that all the land must be pooled and redistributed?

Then what of the estates, amounting altogether, perhaps, to ten or fifteen million acres, which are now exploited in a systematic capitalistic fashion? Their tillage is vastly superior to that of common muzhik land, and they yield twice or thrice as much per acre. Perhaps these scientifically managed estates point the way to the socialized agriculture of the future. To break up these organizations in order to parcel out the land among the peasants would be an economic disaster to Russia. Some propose that the Government take them over and run them as public utilities, but thoughtful men realize that the Government is not yet equal to such a task. Others imagine that the peasants will keep the machinery, retain the salaried manager and experts, work the estate as before for wages, and at the close of the season divide the profits which now go to the enterprising landowner. Such a solution hardly squares with what we know of the peasants. A third alternative is to leave such estates undisturbed because these intelligent proprietors are rendering a service to society. True, but there is little prospect that the people can be brought to look upon them in this light. It seems likely that these estates will go into the melting-pot along with the rest.

How as to the terms on which the lands of the nobles are to be taken over? With much force the socialists urge:

The pomiestchiks, or gentlemen landowners, never invested good money in these lands. They were presented by the crown as an endowment for military services which are now provided on a totally different basis. Not for generations have the noble landowners been called on to render special services to the state. Have they not been parasites long enough? Is is not high time for these loafers to go to work and earn their living like the rest of us? Why should we hand them a sheaf of government bonds for yielding of rentals to which they have long had no moral title?

Very good, but as a matter of fact many of these gentry have only an equity in their estates. For reasons good and bad-to raise capital for the more efficient exploitation of their land or to get money for their extravagances they have borrowed on the security of their estates until the mortgages piled on this land amount to perhaps half its value. Such securities enter into the foundations of all important Russian credit institutions, and these would be shaken or shattered if the private estates were taken over without compensation. It is safe to predict that there will be compensation, at least to the extent of repaying the debts resting on these lands.

Meanwhile the peasants have been taking things into their own hands. In many cases the mir has anticipated the division of the nobleman's estate by seizing and tilling his fields on its own account. The peasants refuse to work his fields for wages. Then perhaps the land committee says to him: "You can't hire anybody to till your land. Well, rather than let it grow weeds when Russia needs food, let the mirs cultivate it this year, and the terms can be adjusted afterward." Of course, once the peasants get their plows into it, they will regard the land as their own, and will never give it up without a struggle. On the estate of Count Sthe Revolution was followed by a drastic downward revision of the rentals to about