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THE BALTIC PROBLEM
95
wind. It was in 1905 that the Lettish socialistic revolution
in Courland overthrew the Russian governing power for the
time being, and in 1917 that a Bolshevik regiment in
Petrograd composed of Letts took a prominent part in
upholding the Bolshevik regime.
The prospects for building up home rule in Esthonia,
Livonia, and Courland are very encouraging. It should be
an easy matter to politically co-ordinate the Letts and the
Esths with the Baltic stock of Teutonic origin who
Christianised, civilised, organised, and managed the country for
centuries, bringing it to a high level of agricultural, industrial,
and social development assisted by the numerically superior
Letts and Esths. There may be political differences between
them which have been unduly exaggerated and aggravated
by political agitators, but it remains a fact that until fifty
years ago, the Baltic burghers and nobility of Teutonic
origin lived in close and amicable and, it may be said,
patriarchal relations with the Lettish and Esthnish people of
town and country. The former patriarchal state of affairs
had, of course, to give way to more democratic social
intercourse, and the ruling gentry endeavoured to bring this
about. While serfdom was abolished in Russia proper as
late as 1861, Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland liberated their
peasants in 1816, 1817, and 1819—namely, nearly half a
century earlier; and while Petrograd organised the economic
life of the Russian peasantry by means of the unpractical
and retrograde common ownership of land, subdivided every
ten years among the householders of the village, the Baltic
landed gentry introduced private lease followed by freehold
property among their peasants. The result was that the
Baltic Provinces, in comparison with the other provinces of
Russia, were more prosperous and more advanced in
agricultural methods. The Letts and Esths, especially the
former, when emigrating into the interior of the country
and competing with Russian peasants, easily beat them by
superior capacity for work and by more rational methods of
cultivation. They were subjected by the landed gentry of
their country to a school, hard perhaps, but at any rate a
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