* Vide supra, p. 343.

If this pedantry were confined to the writing of Reports it might not do much harm.  Unfortunately, it often appears in the sphere of action.  To illustrate this I take a recent instance from the province of Nizhni-Novgorod.  The Zemstvo of that province received from the Central Government in 1895 a certain amount of capital for road-improvement, with instructions from the Ministry of Interior that it should classify the roads according to their relative importance and improve them accordingly.  Any intelligent person well acquainted with the region might have made, in the course of a week or two, the required classification accurately enough for all practical purposes.  Instead of adopting this simple procedure, what does the Zemstvo do?  It chooses one of the eleven districts of which the province is composed and instructs its statistical department to describe all the villages with a view of determining the amount of traffic which each will probably contribute to the general movement, and then it verifies its a priori conclusions by means of a detachment of specially selected “registrars,” posted at all the crossways during six days of each month.  These registrars doubtless inscribed every peasant cart as it passed and made a rough estimate of the weight of its load.  When this complicated and expensive procedure was completed for one district it was applied to another; but at the end of three years, before all the villages of this second district had been described and the traffic estimated, the energy of the statistical department seems to have flagged, and, like a young author impatient to see himself in print, it published a volume at the public expense which no one will ever read.

The cost entailed by this procedure is not known, but we may form some idea of the amount of time required for the whole operation.  It is a simple rule-of-three sum.  If it took three years for the preparatory investigation of a district and a half, how many years will be required for eleven districts?  More than twenty years!  During that period it would seem that the roads are to remain as they are, and when the moment comes for improving them it will be found that, unless the province is condemned to economic stagnation, the “valuable statistical material” collected at such an expenditure of time and money is in great part antiquated and useless.  The statistical department will be compelled, therefore, like another unfortunate Sisyphus, to begin the work anew, and it is difficult to see how the Zemstvo, unless it becomes a little more practical, is ever to get out of the vicious circle.