and his house.  But reducing whole communities to beggary was not wise, so a better way was discovered, and one which entailed no disastrous economic results.  He was flogged.  The time selected for this settling of accounts was when the busy season was over; and Stepniak tells us it was not an unusual thing for more than one thousand peasants in the winter—­in a single commune—­to be seen awaiting their turn to have their taxes “flogged out.”  Of course, before this was endured all means had been exhausted for raising the required amount.  Usury, that surest road to ruin, and the one offering the least resistance, was the one ordinarily followed.  Thus was created that destructive class called Koulaks, or Mir-eaters, who, while they fattened upon the necessities of the peasantry, also demoralized the state by creating a wealthy and powerful class whom it would not do to offend, and whose abominable and nefarious interests must not be interfered with.

Then another sort of bondage was discovered, one very nearly approaching to serfdom.  Wealthy proprietors would make loans to distressed communes or to individuals, the interest of the money to be paid by the peasants in a stipulated number of days’ work every week until the original amount was returned.  Sometimes, by a clause in the contract increasing the amount in case of failure to pay at a certain time, the original debt, together with the accruing interest, would be four or five times doubled.  And if, as was probable, the principal never was returned, the peasant worked on year after year gratuitously, in the helpless, hopeless bondage of debt.  Nor were these the worst of their miseries, for there were the Tchinovniks—­or government officials—­who could mete out any punishment they pleased, could order a whole community to be flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a military force or even lend it to private individuals for the subjugation of refractory peasants.

And this was what they had been waiting and hoping for, for two centuries and a half!  But with touching loyalty not one of them thought of blaming the Tsar.  Their “Little Father,” if he only knew about it, would make everything right.  It was the nobility, the wicked nobility, that had brought all this misery upon them and cheated them out of their happiness!  They hated the nobility for stealing from them their freedom and their land; and the nobility hated them for not being prosperous and happy, and for bringing famine and misery into the state, which had been so kind and had emancipated them.

As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems they presented.  In a land in which the associative principle was indigenous, Socialism was a natural and inevitable growth.  Then, exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into existence that word of dire significance in Russia—­Nihilism, and following quickly upon that, its logical sequence—­Anarchism, which, if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.