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Of these latter I have a collection containing ample materials for a whole series of sensation novels, but I refrain from quoting them, because I do not believe that the criminal annals of a country give a fair representation of its real condition. On the other hand, I do not wish to whitewash serfage or attenuate its evil consequences.
How did the peasantry exist, what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like slaves, among the employers of each parish.
George's Day that is to say, at the end of the agricultural year. This right of migration was abolished by Tsar Boris Godunof who, by the way, was half a Tartar and more than half a usurper and herein lies the essence of serfage in the Russian sense.
But one thing is clear; it was a revolt against oppression which veiled itself under the form of law. The rural tenants found themselves in a mesh of legal claims old services revived, old dues enforced, endless suits in the King's courts grinding them again to serfage. Oppression was no longer the rough blow of the rough baron; it was the delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk.
Part of these gain a miserable pittance as agricultural labourers, and live in a condition infinitely worse than serfage. The others have been forever uprooted from the soil, and have collected in the large towns, where they earn a precarious living in the factories and workshops, or swell the ranks of the criminal classes.
We have seen the private suffering of the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords; with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce this wrong, reduced at a stroke the free labourer again to a serfage from which he has yet fully to emerge.
And it was not to be a Constitution of the ordinary sort the fruit of compromise between hostile political parties but an institution designed calmly according to the latest results of political science, and so constructed that all classes would voluntarily contribute to the general welfare. The necessary prelude to this happy era of political liberty was, of course, the abolition of serfage.
Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness. For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron.
During her reign serfage may be said to have reached its climax. The serfs were regarded by the law as part of the master's immovable property* as part of the working capital of the estate and as such they were bought, sold, and given as presents in hundreds and thousands, sometimes with the land, and sometimes without it, sometimes in families, and sometimes individually.
We have here the basis for a simple and important classification of estates in the time of serfage: Estates on which the dues were exclusively in labour; estates on which the dues were partly in labour and partly in money; and estates on which the dues were exclusively in money. In the manner of exacting the labour dues there was considerable variety.
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