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On the Volga.
149
into other channels ; otherwise ignorance and fanaticism might
have made the dispute too hot.
On our arrival in Moscow the following morning we found all
the shops closed, and the whole city decorated to celebrate the
birthday of the Crown Prince. I have said elsewhere that there
are seven of these festival days, which by Imperial decree must
be celebrated by the suspension of all useful work and business.
Suppose that only one-half of the Russian people are engaged in
uny kind of useful work, these Imperial festivals mean the loss of
over a million years of one person’s labour, and if we take all
the 133 festival days in the year (including Sundays) they
represent about twenty millions of years of one labourer’s time,
not to speak of the moral loss to the people by enforced
systematic idleness.
Between Moscow and St. Petersburg I met a highly-placed
Russian official from the government of Kursk, who Avas an
unusually sympathetic and liberal-minded man for his caste.
He told me about the terrible distress of the peasants in his
province, and was deeply interested in my account of the relief
work of the Tolstoi family.
"The state of things is desperate," he remarked. "The
peasants are not only unable to pay the taxes and the
redemption money for the land, but the State must now support them,
and there are about 35 millions of these destitute and helpless
people. . . . Even in the most favourable circumstances it
must be many years before there can be any change for the
better.
When I asked him what he considered the best means of
bettering the conditions of the people, he said that practical
schools were indispensable, and spoke of a rational system of
migration.
" But," he added, " there is no possibility under present
circumstances of carrying either of these into effect." Then he
reminded me of what I knew before, that several public-spirited
and wealthy gentlemen had offered to establish practical schools
of different kinds at their own cost, but had not been permitted
to do it. A conspicuous case in point was the offer of one
Sibiriakoff to build an agricultural academy in Samara, and
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