of experts in 1903, those with a poor light soil appear at the top, and those with the famous black earth are at the bottom of the list.  In the deliberations of the commission many reasons for this extraordinary state of things are adduced.  Most of them have merely a local significance.  The big fact, taken as a whole, seems to me to show that, in consequence of certain changes of which I shall speak presently, the peasantry of European Russia can no longer live by the traditional modes of agriculture, even in the most fertile districts, and require for their support some subsidiary occupations such as are practised in the less fertile provinces.

     * In 1901 an additional famine grant of 33 1/2 million
     roubles had to be made by the Government.

Another sign of impoverishment is the decrease in the quantity of live stock.  According to the very imperfect statistics available, for every hundred inhabitants the number of horses has decreased from 26 to 17, the number of cattle from 36 to 25, and the number of sheep from 73 to 40.  This is a serious matter, because it means that the land is not so well manured and cultivated as formerly, and is consequently not so productive.  Several economists have attempted to fix precisely to what extent the productivity has decreased, but I confess I have little faith in the accuracy of their conclusions.  M. Polenof, for example, a most able and conscientious investigator, calculates that between 1861 and 1895, all over Russia, the amount of food produced, in relation to the number of the population, has decreased by seven per cent.  His methods of calculation are ingenious, but the statistical data with which he operates are so far from accurate that his conclusions on this point have, in my opinion, little or no scientific value.  With all due deference to Russian economists, I may say parenthetically that they are very found of juggling with carelessly collected statistics, as if their data were mathematical quantities.

Several of the Zemstvos have grappled with this question of peasant impoverishment, and the data which they have collected make a very doleful impression.  In the province of Moscow, for example, a careful investigation gave the following results:  Forty per cent. of the peasant households had no longer any horses, 15 per cent. had given up agriculture altogether, and about 10 per cent. had no longer any land.  We must not, however, assume, as is often done, that the peasant families who have no live stock and no longer till the land are utterly ruined.  In reality many of them are better off than their neighbours who appear as prosperous in the official statistics, having found profitable occupation in the home industries, in the towns, in the factories, or on the estates of the landed proprietors.  It must be remembered that Moscow is the centre of one of the regions in which manufacturing industry has progressed with gigantic strides during the last half-century, and it would