any outstanding mortgage, and would pay the balance in depreciated Treasury bonds.  In these circumstances the proprietors could not, as a rule, adopt what I have called the ideal solution, and had to content themselves with some simpler and more primitive arrangement.  They could employ the peasants of the neighbouring villages to prepare the land and reap the crops either for a fixed sum per acre or on the metayage system, or they could let their land to the peasants for one, three or six years at a moderate rent.

In the northern agricultural zone, where the soil is poor and primitive farming with free labour can hardly be made to pay, the proprietors had to let their land at a small rent, and those of them who could not find places in the rural administration migrated to the towns and sought employment in the public service or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises which were springing up at that time.  There they have since remained.  Their country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and dilapidation.  In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale profitable, the estates are in a very different condition.  The owners cultivate at least a part of their property, and can easily let to the peasants at a fair rent the land which they do not wish to farm themselves.  Some have adopted the metayage system; others get the field-work done by the peasants at so much per acre.  The more energetic, who have capital enough at their disposal, organise farms with hired labourers on the European model.  If they are not so well off as formerly, it is because they have adopted a less patriarchal and more expensive style of living.  Their land has doubled and trebled in value during the last thirty years, and their revenues have increased, if not in proportion, at least considerably.  In 1903 I visited a number of estates in this region and found them in a very prosperous condition, with agricultural machines of the English or American types, an increasing variety in the rotation of crops, greatly improved breeds of cattle and horses, and all the other symptoms of a gradual transition to a more intensive and more rational system of agriculture.

It must be admitted, however, that even in the Black-earth Zone the proprietors have formidable difficulties to contend with, the chief of which are the scarcity of good farm-labourers, the frequent droughts, the low price of cereals, and the delay in getting the grain conveyed to the seaports.  On each of these difficulties and the remedies that might be applied I could write a separate chapter, but I fear to overtax the reader’s patience, and shall therefore confine myself to a few remarks about the labour question.  On this subject the complaints are loud and frequent all over the country.  The peasants, it is said,