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These gentlemen, in a special organ which they had recently founded, pointed out to their countrymen that the Commune was a venerable and peculiarly Russian institution, which had mitigated in the past the baneful influence of serfage, and would certainly in the future confer inestimable benefits on the emancipated peasantry. The other group was animated by a very different spirit.
It was this consideration that had restrained Nicholas from taking any decisive measures with regard to serfage; and it had now considerable weight with the members of the committee, who were nearly all great land-owners.
In the time of serfage the domestic serfs had much to bear from their capricious, violent master. They lived in an atmosphere of abusive language, and were subjected not unfrequently to corporal punishment.
How could the Government take active measures for the spread of national education when it had no direct control over one-half of the peasantry? Above all, how could it be hoped that a great moral regeneration could take place, so long as the nation voluntarily retained the stigma of serfage and slavery?
This fact seems all the more significant when we observe that during this period the number of peasant serfs had diminished. I must now bring this long chapter to an end. My aim has been to represent serfage in its normal, ordinary forms rather than in its occasional monstrous manifestations.
Coming out of these dreams, Alexander had to deal with such realities as the burning of Moscow, the Battle of Leipsic, and the occupation of France; yet, in the midst of those fearful times when the grapple of the emperors was at the fiercest; in the very year of the burning of Moscow Alexander rose in calm statesmanship, and admitted Bessarabia into the empire under a proviso which excluded serfage forever.
In these latter they attributed his conduct to pure caprice, and put it into the same category as those mad pranks in which proprietors of jovial humour sometimes indulged. In the last years of serfage there were a good many landed proprietors like Victor Alexandr'itch men who wished to do something beneficent, and did not know how to do it.
There is a great deal of bustle and talk, and all blame they know not whom." * An epithet commonly applied, at the time of the Emancipation, to the partisans of serfage and the defenders of the proprietors' rights. It was first published in an article on "Secret Societies in Russia," which I contributed to the Fortnightly Review of 1st August, 1877.
Not unfrequently a Volost Elder trades with the money he collects as dues or taxes; and sometimes, when he becomes insolvent, the peasants have to pay their taxes and dues a second time. The Village Assemblies, too, have become worse than they were in the days of serfage.
A glance at the causes of this movement will help us to understand the real nature of serfage in Russia. Up to this point serfage had, in spite of its flagrant abuses, a certain theoretical justification. It was, as we have seen, merely a part of a general political system in which obligatory service was imposed on all classes of the population.
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