With regard to the domestic serfs, it was enacted that they should continue to serve their masters during two years, and that thereafter they should be completely free, but they should have no claim to a share of the land.

It might be reasonably supposed that the serfs received with boundless gratitude and delight the Manifesto proclaiming these principles.  Here at last was the realisation of their long-cherished hopes.  Liberty was accorded to them; and not only liberty, but a goodly portion of the soil—­about half of all the arable land possessed by the proprietors.

In reality the Manifesto created among the peasantry a feeling of disappointment rather than delight.  To understand this strange fact we must endeavour to place ourselves at the peasant’s point of view.

In the first place it must be remarked that all vague, rhetorical phrases about free labour, human dignity, national progress, and the like, which may readily produce among educated men a certain amount of temporary enthusiasm, fall on the ears of the Russian peasant like drops of rain on a granite rock.  The fashionable rhetoric of philosophical liberalism is as incomprehensible to him as the flowery circumlocutionary style of an Oriental scribe would be to a keen city merchant.  The idea of liberty in the abstract and the mention of rights which lie beyond the sphere of his ordinary everyday life awaken no enthusiasm in his breast.  And for mere names he has a profound indifference.  What matters it to him that he is officially called, not a “serf,” but a “free village-inhabitant,” if the change in official terminology is not accompanied by some immediate material advantage?  What he wants is a house to live in, food to eat, and raiment wherewithal to be clothed, and to gain these first necessaries of life with as little labour as possible.  He looked at the question exclusively from two points of view—­that of historical right and that of material advantage; and from both of these the Emancipation Law seemed to him very unsatisfactory.

On the subject of historical right the peasantry had their own traditional conceptions, which were completely at variance with the written law.  According to the positive legislation the Communal land formed part of the estate, and consequently belonged to the proprietor; but according to the conceptions of the peasantry it belonged to the Commune, and the right of the proprietor consisted merely in that personal authority over the serfs which had been conferred on him by the Tsar.  The peasants could not, of course, put these conceptions into a strict legal form, but they often expressed them in their own homely laconic way by saying to their master, “Mui vashi no zemlya nasha”—­that is to say.  “We are yours, but the land is ours.”  And it must be admitted that this view, though legally untenable, had a certain historical justification.*

     * See preceding chapter.