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Pig-headed merchants; apprentices, knavish or honest as the case may be; young girls with a touch of poetry in their natures, who sober down into kindly housewives; tyrannical serf-owners and weak-willed sons of noble families: such is the material of which he builds his entertaining, wholesome, mildly thoughtful dramas.
It so happened, that at that time the landowners, or rather serf-owners, constituted the most depressed 'interest' in that portion of the Russian Empire.
Masses of peasants, hearing vague news of emancipation, learning, doubtless, from their masters' own spiteful lips that the Emperor is endeavoring to tear away property in serfs, take the masters at their word, and determine to help the Emperor. They rise in insurrection. To the bigoted serf-owners this is a godsend.
Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the Russian serf-owners.
In citing these incidents, I do not at all mean to imply that they represent the relations which usually existed between proprietors and village priests, for I am quite aware that wanton cruelty was not among the ordinary vices of Russian serf-owners.
Masses of peasants, hearing vague news of emancipation learning, doubtless, from their masters' own spiteful lips that the Emperor was endeavoring to tear away property in serfs took the masters at their word, and determined to help the Emperor. They rose in insurrection. To the bigoted serf-owners this was a godsend.
Under Nicholas the First's rule many Crown officials and serf-owners used to compel the peasants to introduce the communal culture of small plots of the village lands, in order to refill the communal storehouses after loans of grain had been granted to the poorest commoners.
Notice after notice was given to the serf-owners that they were not to be molested, that no emancipation was contemplated, and that the ukase "contained nothing new." The result was as feeble as the policy. A few serfs were emancipated, and Nicholas halted. The revolutions of 1848 increased his fear of innovation; and, finally, the war in the Crimea took from him the power of innovation.
But these demands were sneered at. The idea of the natural equality in rights of all men, the idea of the personal worth of every man, the idea that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out by no smooth-clad idlers, these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners of those days as they are beyond slave-owners of these days. Nothing was done.
But astonishment was increased a thousand fold at study of the reflex influence for evil upon the serf-owners themselves, upon the whole free community, upon the very soil of the whole country.
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