Various - McClure\'s Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

V >> Various >> McClure\'s Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

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"It's only Hope Carolina," called somebody, and other watchers
laughed; for all knew the wandering ways of this wise and fearless
child.

And so, stumbling, falling, struggling to her feet again,--wiping away
blood once, even, with impatient hand,--on, on the little figure in
pink and white had gone, a brave and storm-driven flower in the cruel
road. And at last there were the shining crosses and columns of the
dead. One inclosure, radiant with more magnolias and angel poplars,
more stately and wonderful than all the rest, was the dear Preston
plot.

The child, who had paused anxiously at the open gate, sighed, sighed
with immense relief, to see it still without the sacrilege of Radical
invasion. He hadn't taken _that_, too! Then, a step farther, she
stopped again. The red clayey place he had taken had neither fence nor
flowers. Only a tree grew near his place, a great solitary pine, with
the low wailing of whose softly swaying needles singing was mingled.

A single person was singing--a single _black_ person. She knew by the
soft mellow roll of the voice, the sweet, oh, honey-sweet sound of the
hymn words, which she herself had sung many times at the Baptist
Sunday-school, where she had to go when there was no Episcopal
minister. The great figure towering above the tiny, dusky group, with
bare woolly head and working, apelike face uplifted to the sky, took
on a new grandeur.

But only for a moment did she think of Pete, so marvelously changed.
The hymn was ending--they were a long way past the dear line, _Safe on
his gentle breast_.

Now they were moving, the little "crowd of mo'ners over yonder,"--all
black it looked, house-servants mostly,--and quickly, with a
breathless fear of being too late, she rushed forward and thrust her
head between the singer and a sobbing petticoated figure beside him.

Then she drew back smiling, smiling divinely.

The grief-stricken eyes at the other side of the little grave--a grave
heaped with Radical roses, sweet with one Democrat myrtle cross--had
seen it, _the white face_.

"You go fust, honey, jus' behin' him," Pete whispered, as, trudging
valiantly along with the rest, Hope Carolina passed out of the
cemetery gate.

It was the quaint custom at funerals in Fairville, especially funerals
with negroes, to follow mourners in line from the grave as well as to
it. What had been begun through a lack of sidewalks had been continued
as a ceremony of passionate respect.

Pete bent soft, wet, grateful eyes upon her, pushing her close behind
the one carriage as he spoke--eyes as dear and tender as any old
nigger eyes Hope Carolina had ever looked into. All at once she
understood: Pete, bad Pete, loved the Radical judge.

She nodded comprehendingly, including all the other black faces--which
seemed to look toward her, too, with a doglike gratitude--in her
flashing smile.

"Of course!"

* * * * *

So it came to pass that Fairville's terrible prophecy was falsified.
In his darkest hour the Radical Judge was not forsaken of all his
race; still unconscious of fatigue and hurt in the cruel clay road,
the little white Democrat, who had toiled this hard way before, led
and redeemed the funeral procession of his child.

POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA

BY GEORGE KENNAN

In an address delivered in New York City on the 14th of January, 1908,
Paul Milyukov, historian, statesman, and leader of the Constitutional
Democratic party in the third Russian Duma, after reviewing
dispassionately, from a liberal point of view, the unsuccessful
attempt at revolution in the great empire of the north, summed up, in
the following words, his conclusions with regard to the present
Russian situation:

"The social composition of the future Russia is now at stake; the fate
of future centuries is now being determined"; but, "wherever we turn
or look, we meet only with new trouble to come, nowhere with any hope
for conciliation or social peace. This, I am afraid, is not the
message that you expected from me, and I should be much happier myself
if I could answer your wish for information with words of hope, and
with the glad tidings that quiet and security have returned to Russia;
but I am here to tell you the truth."

Americans who have not followed closely the sequence of events in
Russia since October, 1905, may feel inclined to ask, "Why should Mr.
Milyukov take such a pessimistic view of the future, when his country
has not only a representative assembly, but an imperial guaranty of
political freedom and 'real inviolability of personal rights'?" The
answer is not far to seek. A representative assembly that has no
power, and an imperial guaranty that affords no security, do not
encourage hopeful anticipations. Russia has never had a representative
assembly, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the words; and as for the
imperial guaranty of political freedom, it was written in water.

Twenty-seven months ago, when Count Witte reported to Nicholas II.
that Russia had "outgrown its governmental framework," and when the
Czar himself, recognizing the necessity of "establishing civil liberty
on unshakable foundations," directed his ministers to give the country
political freedom and allow the Duma to control legislation, there
seemed to be every reason for believing that the crisis had passed and
that the people's fight for self-government had been won; but,
unfortunately, the unstable Czar, who would run into any mold, but
would not keep shape, did not adhere to his avowed purpose for a
single week. In the words of a Russian peasant song:

The Czar promised lightly to go,
And made all his plans for departing;
Then he called for a chair,
And sat down right there,
To rest for a while before starting.

Not even so much as an attempt was made to carry the "freedom
manifesto" into effect, and before the ink with which it was written
had fairly had time to dry, the rejoicing people, who assembled with
flags and mottos in the streets of the principal cities to celebrate
the dawn of civil liberty, were attacked and forcibly dispersed by the
police, and were then cruelly beaten or mercilessly slaughtered by
adherents of a national monarchistic association, hostile to the
manifesto, which called itself the "Union of True Russians."[27]
According to the conservative estimate of Mr. Milyukov, these "true
Russians," with the sympathy and cooeperation of the police, killed or
wounded no less than thirteen thousand other Russians, whom they
regarded as not "true," in the very first week after the freedom
manifesto was promulgated. One not familiar with Russian conditions
might have supposed that the Czar would use all the force at his
command to stop these murderous "pogroms" and to punish the police and
the "true Russians" who were responsible for them; but he seems to
have regarded them as convincing proof that all true Russians would
rather have autocracy than freedom, and, instead of insisting upon
obedience to his manifesto and punishing those who resorted to
wholesale murder as a means of protesting against it, he not only
allowed the slaughter to go on, but, a few months later, showed his
sympathy with the "true Russians" by telegraphing to their president
as follows:

"Let the Union of the Russian People serve as a trustworthy support. I
am sure that all true Russians who love their country will unite still
more closely, and, while steadily increasing their number, will help
me to bring about the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy
Russia."[28]

Disappointed at the Czar's failure to stand by his own manifesto, and
exasperated by the murderous attacks of the Black Hundreds upon
defenseless people in the streets, the Social Democrats, the Social
Revolutionists, and the extreme opponents of the government generally
resorted to a series of armed revolts, which finally culminated in the
bloody barricade-fighting in the streets of Moscow in December, 1905.
Taking alarm at these revolutionary outbreaks, and yielding to the
reactionary pressure that was brought to bear upon him by the
ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the
reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible
will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put
down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the
Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose.

Long before the meeting of the first Duma the freedom manifesto had
become a dead letter; and in July, 1906, when Mr. Makarof, the
Associate Minister of the Interior, was called before the Duma to
explain the inconsistency between the "inflexible will" of the Czar,
as expressed in the freedom manifesto, and the policy of the
administration, as shown in a long series of arbitrary and oppressive
acts of violence, he coolly said that while the freedom manifesto
"laid down the fundamental principles of civil liberty in a general
way," it had no real force, because it did not specifically repeal the
laws relating to the subject that were already on the statute-books.
He admitted that governors-general were still arresting without
warrant, exiling without trial, suppressing newspapers without a
hearing, and dispersing public meetings by an arbitrary exercise of
discretionary power; but he maintained that in so doing they were only
obeying imperial ukases which antedated the freedom manifesto and
which that document had not abrogated. In all provinces, he said,
where martial law had been declared, or where it might in future be
declared, governors and governors-general were not bound by the
academic statement of general principles in the October manifesto, but
were free to exercise discretionary power under the provisions of
certain earlier decrees relating to "reinforced and extraordinary
defense." These decrees, until repealed, were the law of the land, and
they authorized and sanctioned every administrative measure to which
the interpellations related, freedom manifestos to the contrary
notwithstanding.[30]

The Czar's abandonment of the principles set forth in the freedom
manifesto of October 30, 1905, put an end to what Mr. Milyukov has
called "the ascending phase" of the Russian liberal movement. Count
Witte, who had persuaded the Czar to sign the manifesto, was forced to
retire from the Cabinet, and the new government, taking courage from
the apparent loyalty of the army and the successful suppression of
sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in various parts of the empire,
returned gradually to the old policy of ruling by means of
"administrative process," under the sanction of "exceptional" or
"temporary" laws.

In July, 1906, when P. A. Stolypin was appointed Prime Minister, and
when the first Duma was dissolved in order to prevent it from issuing
an address to the people, the government abandoned even the pretense
of acting in conformity with the principles laid down in the freedom
manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and
repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself
confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary
difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results
of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic
cooeperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might,
perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent
caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary
coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or
even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them
depends.

Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that
presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people.
Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that
the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily
worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the
well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that
Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole
peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof
and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat
had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by
competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in
European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who
possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper
allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on
Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported
that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the
net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct
taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land
enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967
were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and
ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net
proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a
daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33]
One might have expected the government to do something for the relief
of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of
aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to
the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr.
Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two,
Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police
surveillance; and two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were
removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth
to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]

If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the
existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner,
instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the
janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants
and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an
extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet,
this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for
the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed
statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned
their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material
showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and
discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the
long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the
government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of
relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive
expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress
which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few
districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before
the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central
provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of
inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the
condition of the peasants as follows:

"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among
the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village
storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the
soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the
struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the
penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is
a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are
passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a
condition in which they have no assured means of support."

Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the
liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees
on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to
them at all, it merely suspended or suppressed the newspapers for
"manifesting a prejudicial tendency," or punished the committees for
"presenting the condition of the people in too unfavorable a light."

[Illustration: PAUL MILYUKOV

CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC LEADER IN THE THIRD DUMA]

A fair measure, perhaps, of the economic condition of a country is the
earning capacity of its inhabitants, and, tried by this test, Russia
stands far below the other civilized states of the world. According to
a report made by S. N. Prokopovich to the Free Economic Society of St.
Petersburg on May 2, 1907, the average annual income of the population
per capita, in the United States and in various parts of Europe, is as
follows:[35]

Country Average income
per capita

United States $173.00
England 136.50
France 116.50
Germany 92.00
Servia and Bulgaria 50.50
Russia 31.50

It thus appears that the average American family earns nearly six
times as much as the average Russian family, and that even in such
comparatively backward and undeveloped parts of Europe as Servia and
Bulgaria the average income of the population per capita is nearly
twice that of Russia.

Another test of the economic condition of a country is its rate of
mortality, taken in connection with the provision that it makes for
the medical care and relief of its people. The death-rate of
Russia--37.3 per thousand--is higher than that of any other civilized
state, and, according to a report made by Dr. A. Shingaref to the
Piragof Medical Congress in Moscow in May, 1907, the health of the
population is more neglected than in any other country in Europe. The
figures by which he proved this are as follows:[36]

Great Britain has one doctor to every 1,100 persons
France " " " " " 1,800 "
Belgium " " " " " 1,850 "
Norway " " " " " 1,900 "
Prussia " " " " " 2,000 "
Austria " " " " " 2,400 "
Italy " " " " " 2,500 "
Hungary " " " " " 3,400 "
Russia " " " " " 7,930 "

In connection with this report it may be noted that while Russia has
only one physician to eight thousand people, there is one policeman to
every nine hundred and one soldier to every one hundred and twelve.

This lack of physicians in Russia is mainly due to the extreme poverty
of the mass of the people and their absolute inability to pay for
medical attendance and care. With an earning capacity of only $31.50
per capita, or $189.00 per annum for a family of six, and with taxes
that cut deeply into even this small revenue, the Russians cannot
afford doctors. Shelter, food, and clothing they must have; but
medical attendance is a luxury that may be dispensed with.

One of the principal causes of the impoverishment of the agricultural
peasants in Russia is the insufficiency of their farm allotments. When
the serfs were emancipated about forty-five years ago, they were not
given land enough to make them completely independent of the landed
proprietors, for the reason that the latter had to have laborers to
cultivate their estates, and it was only in the emancipated class that
such laborers could be found. Since that time the peasant population
has nearly doubled, and an allotment that was originally too small
adequately to support one family now has to support two. This
increasing pressure of the growing population upon the land might have
been met, perhaps, as it has been met in Japan, by intensive
cultivation; but such cultivation presupposes education, intelligence,
and adoption of improved agricultural methods; and the Russian
government never has been willing to give its peasant class even the
elementary instruction that would enable it to read and thus to
acquire modern agricultural knowledge. In 1897, more than thirty years
after the emancipation, the Russian percentage of illiteracy was still
seventy-nine, and on January 1, 1905, only forty-two per cent. of the
children of school age were attending school, as compared with
ninety-five per cent, in Japan.[37] Intensive cultivation, moreover,
involves high fertilization and the use of modern agricultural
implements. The Russian peasants do not own live stock enough to
supply them with the quantity of manure that intensive cultivation
would require,--millions of them have no farm-animals at all,--and,
with their earning capacity of only $31.50 a year per capita, they
cannot afford to buy modern plows and improved agricultural machinery.
If there were diversified industries in Russia, the agricultural
peasants who are unable to maintain themselves on their insufficient
allotments might find work to do in mills or factories; but Russia is
not a manufacturing country, and her industrial establishments furnish
only two per cent. of her population with employment.

[Illustration: P. A. STOLYPIN

PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR]

Unable to get a living from their small and comparatively unproductive
farms, and equally unable to find work elsewhere, the peasants clamor
loudly for more land; and when, as the result of a bad harvest,
their situation becomes intolerable, they are seized with a sort of
berserker madness and break out into fierce bread riots, which
frequently end in regular campaigns of pillage and arson. In 1905 they
attacked and plundered the estates of more than two thousand landed
proprietors and inflicted upon the latter a loss of more than
$15,000,000. The disorder extended to one hundred and sixty-one
districts and covered thirty-seven per cent. of the area of European
Russia.

Such alarming evidences of wide-spread distress and discontent
naturally forced the agrarian question upon the attention not only of
the government but of the people's representatives in parliament. The
Constitutional Democrats in the first Duma proposed to obtain more
land for the common people by following the example set by Alexander
II. when he emancipated the serfs, namely, by expropriating in part,
and at a fixed price, the estates of the nobility, and selling the
land thus acquired to the peasants upon terms of deferred payment
extending over a long time. The government of Nicholas II., however,
would not listen to this proposition, and the Stolypin ministry is now
trying to satisfy the urgent need of the peasants by selling to them
land that belongs to the state or the crown; by making it easier for
them to buy land through the Peasants' Bank; and by facilitating
emigration to Siberia, where there is supposed to be land enough for
all. None of these measures, however, seems likely to afford more than
partial and temporary relief. Most of the state and crown land in
European Russia is not suitable for cultivation, or it is situated in
northern provinces where agriculture is unprofitable on account of
extremely unfavorable climatic conditions. According to Professor
Maxim Kovalefski, the crown lands of European Russia comprise about
22,000,000 acres. Of the 4,933,000 acres that are arable and well
located, 4,420,000 acres are already leased to the peasants upon terms
that are quite as favorable as they could hope to obtain by purchase,
and the remaining 513,000 acres would afford them no appreciable
relief. In order to give them the same per capita allowance of land
that they had at the time of the emancipation, it would be necessary
to add about 121,000,000 acres to their present holdings, and no such
amount of arable state or crown land is available.[38]

From the operations of the Peasants' Bank little more is to be
expected. In the twenty years of its history it has bought about
17,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, but has disposed of only
3,600,000 acres to peasant communes. The rest it has sold to
associations or land-speculating companies. The extreme need of the
people, moreover, has so forced up the price of land in the black-soil
belt as to make acquisition of it by the poorer class of peasants
almost impossible. Between November 16, 1905, and August 31, 1906, the
bank bought about 5,000,000 acres from landed proprietors, at an
average price of $23.30 per acre, and resold it on bond and mortgage
to individuals, companies, or peasant communes at an average rate of
$24.44 per acre. Comparatively little of this land, however, went into
the possession of the class that needed it most. The 4,997 peasant
families in the district of Voronezh, who can make both ends meet only
by limiting themselves to a per capita allowance of a pound and a
third of rye flour a day, are not financially able to buy land at
$24.44 per acre, and this is the economic condition of hundreds of
thousands of families in the central provinces.[39]

Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing
population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the
government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if
unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of
cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior,
openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was
not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the
bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the
distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that
nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to
their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to
1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands
in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901
and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In
other words, more than half of the peasants who made a journey of
fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could
not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had
hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]

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