Since these alleviations have been granted the annual total demanded from the peasantry for direct taxation and land-redemption payments is 173 million roubles, and the average annual sum to be paid by each peasant household varies, according to the locality, from 11 1/2 to 20 roubles (21s. 6d. to 40s.).  In addition to this annuity there is a heavy burden of accumulated arrears, especially in the central and eastern provinces, which amounted in 1899 to 143 millions.  Of the indirect taxes I can say nothing definite, because it is impossible to calculate, even approximately, the share of them which falls on the rural population, but they must not be left out of account.  During the ten years of M. Witte’s term of office the revenue of the Imperial Treasury was nearly doubled, and though the increase was due partly to improvements in the financial administration, we can hardly believe that the peasantry did not in some measure contribute to it.  In any case, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them, under actual conditions, to improve their economic position.  On that point all Russian economists are agreed.  One of the most competent and sober-minded of them, M. Schwanebach, calculates that the head of a peasant household, after deducting the grain required to feed his family, has to pay into the Imperial Treasury, according to the district in which he resides, from 25 to 100 per cent, of his agricultural revenue.  If that ingenious calculation is even approximately correct, we must conclude that further financial reforms are urgently required, especially in those provinces where the population live exclusively by agriculture.

Heavy as the burden of taxation undoubtedly is, it might perhaps be borne without very serious inconvenience if the peasant families could utilise productively all their time and strength.  Unfortunately in the existing economic organisation a great deal of their time and energy is necessarily wasted.  Their economic life was radically dislocated by the Emancipation, and they have not yet succeeded in reorganising it according to the new conditions.

In the time of serfage an estate formed, from the economic point of view, a co-operative agricultural association, under a manager who possessed unlimited authority, and sometimes abused it, but who was generally worldly-wise enough to understand that the prosperity of the whole required the prosperity of the component parts.  By the abolition of serfage the association was dissolved and liquidated, and the strong, compact whole fell into a heap of independent units, with separate and often mutually hostile interests.  Some of the disadvantages of this change for the peasantry I have already enumerated above.  The most important I have now to mention.  In virtue of the Emancipation Law each family received an amount of land which tempted it to continue farming on its own account, but which did not enable it to earn a living and pay its rates and taxes.  The peasant thus became a kind of amphibious